Author: Simon Sheridan

In the last couple of posts I’ve talked a lot about the rise of the Magical and its contribution to the craziness afflicting the modern West. The nudge units, spin doctors, psy-ops and other shenanigans all fit into the category of applied Magic, as does the modern propaganda machine consisting of what’s left of the mainstream media plus the various attempts to influence public opinion through the manipulation of social media.

After writing last week’s post, it became clear to me that I needed a separate post to address what I think is the other primary contributor to the modern madness which we can call the deficient Mental Consciousness. The Mental Consciousness arose with the emergence of logic and dialectic in Ancient Greece, Christianity and especially the activities of the Church in Europe, the scientific method and the patriarchy. It is this Consciousness which is breaking down right before our eyes and thus it’s no coincidence that science, logic, law and gender issues are at the forefront of that breakdown.

Recall that calculus is all about little bits; increments of different degrees of smallness. The way my high school maths teacher explained it was by reference to the “minute”. The word minute comes from Latin minutus which means “small”. Minuta had already been in use in geometry to describe small degrees of a circle. It then got applied to time with the appearance of the now familiar circular clock face. The word “second” was originally secunda minuta which means the second order of smallness. Since then, we’ve added milliseconds which is derived from the Latin mille meaning “thousand”. The point is that these are all different degrees of smallness.

To return to beginner’s calculus, we start with the simple equation:

y = x²

Then we add the differential:

y + dy = (x +dx)²

When we expand this, we get :

y + dy = x² + 2x * dx + (dx)²

At this point the teacher informs us that we don’t need to worry about that (dx)² on the end because it is a second order smallness. It’s too small to matter. So, we can just cross it out. The same goes for equations like y = x⁵ where we get to leave out the second and third order differential. So, we solve some equations leaving out the smaller derivatives and eventually the teacher shows us that we can apply a short cut for solving such equations, which is nx^(n-1).

Now, as a high school maths students who’s already sick of solving equations, this is music to your ears. You eagerly embrace the short cut, whizz through your homework and go and play computer games or upload a video of yourself dancing to TikTok. But that shortcut is based on having excluded the higher order parts of the equation. Strictly speaking, all of the answers given by the shortcut are a little bit wrong. But your maths textbook doesn’t reflect that and your final grade for the subject doesn’t require you to know it. No doubt most students forget it instantly. But it always bugged me. When, some years later, I read Gerald Weinberg’s Introduction to General Systems Thinking, I realised that this trick of leaving things out was more fundamental than I had realised.

Excluding things that were too small to matter was how Newton arrived at his law of universal gravitation: F = G(Mm/r²). Firstly, Newton deliberately ignored all the other celestial bodies in the solar system and focused on just the seven planets. Next, he assumed that because the sun is so huge relative to the planets only the pairwise relation between each planet and the sun was relevant. This allowed him to rule out all other combinations and reduce the number of calculations required. In essence, he did the same thing that we see in the calculus, he simplified things down by excluding elements that were assumed to be too small to matter. Just like in calculus, the simplifications free up our time and cognitive resources to solve more difficult problems. It’s only in this way that we are able to calculate anything because when there are too many variables the number of calculations grows astronomically (see the Three Body Problem as an example of that).

This use of simplifications is the secret to what is now known as classical mechanics. Recently, I randomly stumbled across a thread on an online physics forum. Somebody posted a question in relation to a university level physics problem which went something like this: “Are we supposed to leave out this part of the equation?” There followed a long conversation where people tried to remember why that part was left out but ultimately nobody could remember the reason. The resolution of the thread was that it should be left out but nobody could remember why. So, we see that this business is simplifying and excluding things that don’t matter is still a core part of the way physics is done.

Simplifying things is not a problem but it becomes a problem when we forget that we have simplified. Newton and others at that time knew the simplifying assumptions he had made. But sometime between then and now this knowledge seems to have been lost and science became reified into the quasi-religion that we see nowadays. Models which are descriptions of the behaviour of objects have come to be seen as if they are the word of God himself; as if they are reality itself. But the map is not the territory.

One way to think about the territory is that it is the testing part of the process. There are simplifying assumptions built into the theoretical models. Then there is the testing of those models and this introduces further difficulties. Newton worked out his theory of gravitation in relation to the massive bodies of the planets of the solar system. Down here on Earth, the force of gravitation is much weaker and this makes testing a problem because the equipment we have lacks sensitivity. This means that the empirical evidence is not conclusive that the law of universal gravitation holds for objects smaller than a human body. There’s no evidence that it doesn’t. But we just don’t know.

Here we see the first element of the deficient Mental Consciousness. It’s the hubris of supposing that physics held the keys to the universe and that we would soon be able to calculate everything. The second element is related to the first and came to be known as physics envy. We took the methods of classical mechanics and began using them in other scientific domains including the life sciences. This led to an attempt to measure anything and everything, including things which could not and should not be measured. But the more damaging problem was related to the simplification trick.

In maths class, nobody’s life depends on us ignoring the second order differential. And in physics class, the other celestial bodies in the solar system are not going to get upset if we don’t include them in the law of universal gravitation. But if we are testing a new medication, let’s say a brand new type of vaccine, simplifying assumptions become a matter of life and death. If I told you the “safety calculation” was that the vaccine was 99.999% safe, that seems pretty good. A 0.001% fatality rate sounds pretty small. Is it “too small to matter”? Well, if we are going to give the medication just to people are who are on death’s door, it probably is too small to matter. But if we are going to give it to “everybody on Earth” including healthy people, then even a fatality rate of 0.001% mean tens of thousands of people will die. Who gets to decide that this is “too small to matter”? Who gets to the decide that any other injuries caused by the vaccine are too small to matter? Context matters and simplifying assumptions become questions of politics and morality.

This is a familiar pattern in science. A new theory comes on the scene, addresses some well entrenched problems that weren’t previously able to be solved and opens up new horizons. There’s a period of excitement and “progress”. Then the theory is pushed into new areas where it doesn’t work so well. It starts to accumulate “debt” and the beautiful simplicity of the original formulation gets lost as explanatory additions are tacked on to try and explain the parts of reality that just don’t seem to work. Eventually a new theory comes along and the process starts over.

One of the things it entailed was a new understanding of Earth vis a vis the heavens. When Newton compared the moon to an apple, he was implying that the same laws applied to both. But for millennia the heavens had been seen as more perfect than the Earth. This idea has strong religious and cosmological roots (e.g. The Fall) and also had a basis in theory as the movement of planets was seen to be more geometrically ideal than movement on Earth. The revolution Newton, Galileo and others brought was that the movement of the heavenly bodies and the movement of objects on Earth were subject to the same laws. The heavens were, at least in this respect, not more perfect than Earth, just different (frictionless).

These days we have divorced science from theology, cosmology and philosophy (another aspect of deficient Mental Consciousness). Thus nobody cares about these kinds of issue any more and they don’t get taught about them in school. As a result, few people can recognise that the Newtonian revolution looks incredibly similar to a pattern implied by the emergence of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. That is, there are technical and mathematical advances but those advances imply an entirely new world view. The change of worldview implied by relativity and quantum mechanics could be as revolutionary as the change that happened around the time of Newton. But this time it is not the Church that is working to prevent the emergence of the new worldview but the scientific establishment itself which is married to the materialist view of the universe. History has a sense of irony.

We can summarise the arrival of the deficient Mental Consciousness as follows.

Firstly, the success of classical mechanics went to people’s heads. We forgot about the simplifying assumptions and came to believe that physics was reality and not just a more or less approximate description of reality. Through the phenomenon of physics envy, the model of physics was used in other sciences where it did not belong. Applying simplifying assumptions to inanimate objects isn’t going to cause any problems. When you apply simplifying assumptions to domains involving living beings, especially human beings, you are treading into very dangerous territory not just from a technical but also from a moral point of view. It is no coincidence that early medical experiments and procedures were carried out on marginalised people i.e. those who were deemed “not to matter” (in the same way that people injured by or who refused to take the corona vaccine have been made to feel that they don’t matter).

On top of these problems there is the fact that science is now a career-path and most of the people who call themselves scientists earn their living from the system. It is said that science progresses one funeral at a time and this points to the fact that human beings really don’t like changing their mind, especially about deep elements of their worldview. But when you earn a living from the scientific establishment, you are even less likely to change your mind as this will likely hurt your career prospects, especially when the money that is paying your salary comes from sources that have a vested interest in certain outcomes.

Money, prestige and power now infest science. As we saw in the last two years, the number of scientists and “experts” willing to challenge the system that pays their salaries is small. Such dissenters were “too small to matter”. They were easily character assassinated by the propaganda machine, kicked off social media and relegated to the sidelines.

It all starts to look a hell of a lot like history repeating and the last two years have a lot in common with the psychology of The Inquisition. It is the view of Gebser and others that quantum mechanics and relativity are part of a larger change of worldview known as the Integral Consciousness. It is this which is trying to emerge but because it is such a threat to the existing worldview it is being fought tooth and nail. If this comparison is true, the change awaiting us could be as fundamental as the Earth no longer being the centre of the universe.

Viewed this way, it looks as if there is a quite specific dynamic in modern society that has developed as a way to prevent the Integral Consciousness (or something like it) from manifesting. On the one hand, we have postmodernism. There are some good ideas in postmodernism that fit with the broader concept of the Integral Consciousness but these are buried beneath a set of theories whose only reason for existing seems to be to sow division among the public (always a useful tool for politicians looking to divide and conquer).

Meanwhile, the idea of science based on the principles of classical mechanics as eternal and infallible truth about reality continues to hold sway in the general culture. This idea is, of course, promoted by all the practitioners of science who wish to partake of the prestige and power that comes with it and all the business interests who earn money from the system promote the idea through their propaganda efforts while beating into submission anybody who dares challenge the dogma. It’s not hard to see that such a system serves financial and political interests. But what is less obvious is that it also serves to uphold the worldview of western culture. That worldview is the deficient Mental Consciousness. It had metastasised so much that when it was challenged in early 2020 it had to respond with all the hubris and cluelessness that we have seen in the last two years.

The general culture no longer understands how science (classical mechanics) worked, has reified science into a religion, and is willfully blind to the fact that science no longer produces the goods. With corona, all of these elements came to the fore in the most spectacular fashion and the result has been a dismal, comprehensive failure of nearly all the institutions of society at the same time. All done in the name of “science”. Although many people are still in denial, you couldn’t hope for a more comprehensive defeat of the worldview of modern Western culture. For that reason, I think that corona represents a major turning point. In the next post, I’ll finally get round to explaining what I think that is.

In last week’s post, I presented an interpretation of Freudian psychology as the re-discovery of the Magical Consciousness in the West. Freud said all societies are based on the repression of instincts and drives. But if those instincts and drives represent primal energy, when that energy is channeled into the structures of society it becomes Magic because Magic is, by definition, the channeling of energy. When society channels Magic energy, it is called exoteric. When the individual channels energy, it is called esoteric.

For most of human history, the Magical energy available to any society was limited by the lack of “connectivity”. One way to view the Church in Europe (and prior to that in the Roman empire), was as a network which spanned across geographical and political boundaries and channelled Magic energy. That would explain why the Church used that network to actively suppress folk magic. It didn’t want the competition. The Church’s Magical power was allied with political power up until the 19th century. Some materialist cynics might say the Church was the propaganda arm of the State. To paraphrase Napoleon, religion was the only thing stopping the public from defenestrating the 1%.  

So, we end up at the start of the 20^th century with two Magico-political power bases in Labour and Capital. This dynamic began to dissolve after WW2. Partly this was because labour had won a number of concessions from capital that eased the pressure (energy) in the political sphere. But there were a couple of other important trends.

The consumer economy and its associated marketing Magic further reduced the Magical energetic base of the labour movement. The appearance of Blair, Clinton and Keating as leaders of the labour parties in the 90s was actually the official symbol that it was all over. Those supposedly labour leaders promptly implemented the neoliberal economic agenda. It took about 20 years, a very short time in historical terms, for the blowback to manifest as Trump and Brexit. But by then it was too late.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was also the era of “spin” in politics. Not that politics had been a bastion of moral purity before that, but that there was a noticeable, shall we say, loosening of moral restrictions at this time. But spin is just the use of the same applied Magic that had already been shown to work in the consumer economy in the realm of politics. Some have called this the “post-truth” era of politics. But in our terminology, it’s the Magical era. Combined with the already high levels of Magic practiced in the market economy, this extra dose of Magic into the public discourse seems to have come mostly at the expense of rational discussion. Then came the next development really changed the equation: the internet.

In some ways, the internet follows the other development in the post war era that we can analyse using the Magical lens; namely, the rise of pop culture; aka sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. This was a bottom-up, grassroots Magical movement that allowed four working class lads from Liverpool to become the Beatles and a talented but disorganised dropout from America to become Jimi Hendrix. Although not many people would have thought about it this way, the movement was predicated on the same kind of esoteric spirituality that had become popular in the 19^th century. It was a kind of personal magic. As Frank Zappa noted, the record company capitalists had no idea what was going on but they were happy to let it happen as it earned them small fortunes. They owned the infrastructure. The energy, the Magic, came from the people on the scene. This same pattern would later be reproduced on the internet especially in rise of social media.

From a Magical point of view, what happened was the dissipation of energy. The old record label system channeled the energy coming up from the grassroots music scene. When that system fell apart, the energy was dispersed and the power disappeared. The same thing happened to any other domain that was predicated on the exchange of information. The one that has had perhaps the most profound effect on the public discourse was the disappearance of the news media as the (genuine) fourth estate. Again, this was due to a collapsing business model caused by the loss of monopoly on supply but, in magical terms, we think of it as a dispersal of energy.

Beginning in earnest in the early 90s, the bottom-up movement that had manifested as post war pop culture was channelled into the internet. Steve Jobs is the best representative of that development because the early internet and computer practitioners were tied up quite closely with other esoteric, bottom up movements that were taking place. Jobs was hanging around with the hippies in northern California talking about systems thinking and open source software.

He went on to develop the iPhone and become a squillionaire. Did he sell out? Did he open the door to a tidal wave of narcissism? Maybe. But is Jobs really to blame? You can do all kinds of things with your iPhone. You can use it to watch porn or post videos of yourself dancing half naked on TikTok, or you can use it to dictate the next War and Peace. The fact that most people use it for the former and not the latter is not really Jobs’ fault. One thing the internet and iPhone did achieve was to network together billions of people around the world and that has had massive Magical ramifications.

With the Magical collapse of labour that became official in the early 90s, the political situation in all western countries was that there was no longer a single difference between the two major parties. Most countries became essentially one party states. Meanwhile, the public was no longer divided but had become a single mass of consumers. The Magical techniques that had worked so well in selling products now became ubiquitous in the political sphere. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, what all this amounted to was an enormous amount of power (Magical energy) suddenly concentrated in the hands of the western “elites”. To say that the power went to their heads is an understatement.

A key point to bear in mind is that the elites have been practising a form of Magic that had been accidentally discovered through Freudian psychology. But they don’t call it Magic. They call is marketing or public relations or spin or nudge units or whatever. The typical conspiracy theorist explanation is that they are all psychopaths who are using manipulative tactics to confuse and deceive the public. No doubt some of them are psychopaths. But if we think about this in Magical terms and we assume none of them know what they are doing when it comes to Magic, then another possibility opens up: they are possessed by their own Magic.

The robotic hypnosis of a Justin Trudeau with his ever-perfect, so serious, speech intonation or a Jacinda Ardern with her automatic “smile” or here in Victoria with our very own political terminator, Dictator Dan Andrews, betray all the hallmarks of Magical possession. Modern politics has become based almost entirely on Magic to the exclusion of reason and logic. Why else would politicians continually back projects that have no chance of working (like stopping a respiratory virus with an experimental vaccine). This would make them not just psychopaths, but imbeciles too.

[Edit: since writing this I’ve realised I need to distinguish between two definitions of “psychopath”. The one I used in the above paragraph is the standard definition in our culture: the calculating but morally reprehensible person who feels no empathy. The second definition is the one I am implying in this article in general: a person overtaken by magic and therefore not operating either at the level of soul (psyche+pathology) or reason (Mental Consciousness). I probably should have called this post “Redefining Psychopathy” as that would fit with the redefinition of psychology].

Politics is now nothing more than a power game and Magic is power. But when you practice politics as nothing more than a power game, when you are willing to say anything, absolutely anything, to hold onto power, you must give up any last vestige of the Mental Consciousness, which is to say any last grasp you might have on reason, logic and law. That seems to me to be a pretty good description of where the leaders of most western nations are right now.

Thus, we have one form of Magic which is the top-down Magic of the elites channelled mostly through the mainstream media which is now owned by the state, the corporations and the billionaires, the only entities in society who still pay for its services. The other primary form of Magic rests with the public via the internet. This is the personal, esoteric Magic that began in earnest with post war pop culture. The way in which this energy is channelled is the same as the old recording industry model. The capitalists own just the infrastructure i.e. the social media platforms, the search engines and the server farms. The energy comes from the ground up. This energy is mostly dissipated in narcissism but the networking effects of the internet allow for new, uncoordinated, decentralised blow ups.

These blows up look a lot like the kind of positive feedback loops we saw in the boom-bust cycles of 19th century capitalism. From the point of view of Mental Consciousness, they look crazy and irrational and that’s because cause and effect goes out the window. Nobody could have predicted that The Beatles would become The Beatles or that James Marshall would become Jimi Hendrix or that Apple Computers would become the biggest company in the world. Similarly, nobody could have predicted that Trump would become President or that a supposedly new cold virus discovered in China would lead to the entire global economy being turned on its head.

None of these can be analysed logically, rationally and causally. But the Magical doesn’t care about logic and reason. It just cares about energy and how it is channeled. The internet is the new medium through which that channeling occurs. Trump could never have won without the internet and corona could never have occurred without the internet. It took network effects, the random conglomeration of individual energy into a giant snowball of energy channeled through the internet, for these things to happen.

In the Trump presidency, we saw the bottom-up magical forces of the internet defeat the top-down magical forces of the elites and this is why the elites proceeded to have a total freak out and be reduced to blubbering incoherency. Corona also had all the features of a bottom-up Magical event again driven through the internet where daily case counts and videos of people supposedly collapsing on the street in China or whatever else. It’s not hard to see that Trump’s opponents saw what could be done with the situation early on and started pouring petrol of the fire. The role of the Church once was, theoretically, to be the fire brigade to try and control such magical energetic outbursts. But there is nobody to do that nowadays.

Where will things go from here? Is the west going to devolve completely into the Magical Consciousness? Perhaps. The problem is that you can’t run an advanced industrial economy that way. You need at least a modicum of Mental Consciousness for that to work. But the advanced industrial economy underpins modern society, including the internet. If it goes away, so does the Magic. We’ll discuss that more in the next post.

A couple of posts ago, I did a brief summary of the Integral Consciousness which included some preliminary definitions of the Magical, the Mythical and the Mental. In this post, I want to expand on those definitions and sketch out how each plays an active role in modern life and society. We might tell ourselves that we don’t believe in Magic and Myth, but they are pervasive in our world. By denying their existence, all we do is relegate them to the unconscious from where they bubble up and manifest in negative form. Only by taking them seriously can we learn how to integrate them properly, the first step on the path to the Integral Consciousness.

The Magical

One of my favourite Bill Hicks comedy routines is the one where he talks about the use of sex in advertising. He describes the “ultimate television commercial” featuring nothing but a beautiful naked woman being associated with a brand name. It’s funny cos it’s true. The use of sex in advertising and marketing is so common these days that there’s probably few people left alive who remember a time when it was different. But the truth is that the gratuitous use of manipulative tactics has only become commonplace in advertising in the post war years.

This made some business sense in the world of 1923 when the general public was, by modern standards, incredibly information poor. An advertiser who provided reliable information would have won trust and that would have turned into financial reward via repeat sales. That was how you got to the top of advertising back then. Hopkins assumes that the consumer is a rational agent and the advertiser’s job is to provide them with appropriate information for them to make a rational judgement.

The connection with Freud is no coincidence here because what Freud discovered, although he wouldn’t have thought it about in this way, was the Magical. To the extent that modern advertising is based on Freudian psychology, it is actually a form of applied Magic. When Bill Hicks called modern marketers “Satan’s little helpers”, it was this incorporation of the irrational via Magic that he was referring to. (In doing so, Hicks betrayed his Christian heritage because the Church had for millennia suppressed Magic by associating it with Satan).

One way to think about modern psychology is that it’s the Magical and the Mythical viewed through the lens of the Mental. It was the attempt, fashionable at the time Freud and Jung were working, to achieve the same level of clarity and certainty in relation to the psyche that physics had achieved in the material realm. That attempt was always doomed to fail because the Magical and Mythical are entirely different realms not amenable to the methodology of the hard sciences. We would do better, I think, to de-Mentalise them i.e. remove the veneer of science and call them by their real names: Magic and Mythic. Then we start to deal with them on their own terms.  

Man is an animal and like all animals has certain instinctual drives of which one of the most powerful is the sex drive. Let’s call all these drives and instincts by the generic term “energy”. As anybody who has lived on a farm or spent time around groups of animals knows, the physically largest animal is not necessarily the alpha of the pack. Often an even much smaller animal can be the top of the pecking order. If raw physical power is not the determinant of dominance, what is? The answer: energy. A smaller animal often has more “spirit” than a larger one and wins the top position that way. Even in the brute force world of the animal kingdom, “energy” (spirit) seems to trump “matter”.

In Freudian terms, it is this energy which society represses. But let’s take a more neutral approach and call it control. Society is predicated on the control of innate energy (drives and instincts). To take just one example, every society has marriage rites and sexual norms, these work to focus the sexual energy of the population in a way that ensures the stability of society. But focusing energy is practically the definition of Magic. Therefore, society is built on Magic. The marriage ceremony is one ceremony among many which takes energy and directs it to a certain purpose.

What Edward Bernays discovered was a way to manipulate energy for the purpose that his customers were paying him for; namely, to get consumers to buy products.  Sex was an obvious tactic because the channelling of the sex drive is foundational to society. Moreover, the Victorian era had an extreme form of control of sexual desire and so there was a whole lot of built up sexual energy waiting to get channelled somewhere. The baby boom was just one direction for it. In fact, it might not be an exaggeration to say that the whole of post war pop culture was predicated on the use of that energy. Elvis was decent singer and Marilyn Monroe a decent actress, but pretty sure their artistic skills were not the main drawcard.

The recent turn towards the darker energies of fear, dread and death (Thanatos) also makes sense from this perspective. As Hicks alluded to, the blatant use of sex in advertising and pop culture has been taken almost as far as it can go short of putting full-scale porn on billboards. Combined with a huge liberalisation of sexual norms, there’s simply no more sex energy in the tank. Thus, the advertisers, public relations people and politicians have turned to the darker Magical energies of fear, dread and terror to wield control. It’s almost certain they are not doing it “on purpose”. They just do whatever works and that’s what works at the moment.

In general, we can think of Magic as any activity, ceremony or structure that manipulates energy. Examples in modern life are the aforementioned advertising and marketing, music (especially loud and rhythmic music like rock’n’roll and electronic dance), sporting matches and any kind of group activity involving large numbers of people such as a Trump or Obama political rally, drug use including performance enhancing and recreational drugs, religious or quasi-religious ceremonies such as marriage etc.

A great deal of modern public discourse is also Magic. A good example is trolling, which has become all pervasive in recent years. The point of trolling is not to communicate and exchange ideas, it is to “get a reaction”. But that reaction is energy. Trolling achieves the involuntary release of energy on the part of the victim.

Finally, we shouldn’t get the wrong impression here. Magic is not necessarily bad. In fact, it can be a great source of pleasure. To paraphrase Nietzsche, a world without Magic would be a mistake. Magic is the foundation of music, sex, romance and many other enjoyable activities. The point is to recognise it for what it is so that when Magic is being performed on you, even from somebody who doesn’t consciously know what they are doing, you are able to deal with it and perhaps even utilise it yourself.

The Mythical

The Mythical is also about cycles and so any kind of attunement to nature belongs here too. Even in modern cities, which are otherwise removed from the cycles of nature, we nevertheless create the regular cycle of the working week while the seasons are marked by proxy through sport (football in winter, some form of bat and ball in summer).

The “grind” of the work week captures some of the pessimism which marks the Mythical Consciousness; the feeling of being trapped on a hamster wheel, stuck in a loop with no way out. Life and death are perhaps the ultimate cycle that defines the Mythical. In both the Old Testament and Homer we find a pessimistic (some might call it a heroically honest) attitude to death which differs from the Magical and the (Christian) Mental in presupposing that death is the end of the line. Even the greatest of heroes are humbled by it. Christianity was revolutionary partly because it offered a way to break out of the cycle.

Psychoanalysis, especially that which focuses on dream and imagery, belongs to the Mythical. Jung had his patients create their own mythology through visualisation, painting and writing. One of Jung’s dissident followers, James Hillman, realised the onanism inherent in such activities and attempted to get around it by removing the Ego from the picture and reconnecting with the collective elements of myth. Jung had already presupposed this to a certain extent but he took the idea of the archetypes in a different, and I think more fruitful, direction with his collaboration with Wolfgang Pauli. But that’s a subject for another post.

Pursuing the Mythical from the point of view of the modern Ego is a dangerous activity. Even Jung thought he was going crazy at times. The reason is because the Mythical, like the Magical, requires the suppression of the Ego but the average modern Westerner is so wound up in the Ego after two millennia of pursuing it with vigour that lapsing into an ego-less state constitutes a form of terror. That’s partly what a “bad acid trip” is all about. In our materialist society, much of mental illness gets attributed to physiological disorders and treated with medication. But the modern concept of mental illness grew out of the tradition which traced the underlying issue to Magic (through Freud) and Myth (through Jung). It’s no accident that mental illness correlates very strongly with drug use and social isolation.

Jung pursued his active imagination experiments in a closed room by himself. But he was a married man with a vibrant career and social life. From that foundation, he was able to experiment with a more pure form of the Mythical without going nuts. For younger people with a less developed Ego or people more socially isolated, such “experiments” are dangerous. It’s an outcome we are seeing more of these days with the so-called mental health epidemic. Isolated people stuck at home watching movies and television are over-indulging in the Mythic without knowing it. Throw some drugs into the mix and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Nevertheless, like the Magical, the Mythic is not inherently bad or good. It depends on how you use it.

The Mental

Although modern society was built on the Mental Consciousness, we see mainly its decadent aspects these days. The formative elements of the Mental – logic and dialectic, monotheistic religion and empirical science – no longer play a role in the everyday lives of the average Westerner. We still “believe” in science but science was never something to be believed in. That was the whole point. Science was about truth even if that truth happened to go against belief. Socrates was made to drink the hemlock because he broke with the beliefs of his society. That the single individual, whether as philosopher, scientist or prophet, could be right while the collective was wrong was one of the foundational concepts of the Mental and distinguished it from the Magical and Mythical.

In the Mythical, words are abundant with a variety of meaning, a feature which natural language still holds to this day. One of the first requirements of the Mental Consciousness is to remove the ambiguity from words so that their meaning can be fixed and placed in clear and stable logical relations. If words can be replaced by mathematical symbols, all the better. This precision is the strength of the Mental. Whereas the Mythical is based on polarities of meaning that, from the modern point of view, go round in circles and never achieve anything (aka circular reasoning), the Mental Consciousness is directed. It leads somewhere. It gets to an endpoint. The spatial metaphors here are valid because vision is the primary mode of the Mental while for the Magical it is hearing and the Mythical is about imagination. One way to think about the Mental is that it seeks clarity

The law is another example of the Mental. Again, we are used to seeing it in its decadent modern form of legalese; an indecipherable maze of jargon designed to increase the social power of lawyers and bureaucrats. But once upon a time the law brought clarity to the jungle of informal relations that constitutes normal human society. The law was also a way to restrict the power of the executive. We saw an example of a lapse into that old world during the last two-and-a-half years. The law was overridden as governments imposed arbitrary and often contradictory rules by diktat. Gone was any pretense of reason and logic and the idea of explaining things rationally. This was replaced by gaslighting, appeals to emotion and brute force, all indicative of the Magical.

That this should be affecting sport is fitting because sport is another manifestation of the Mental Consciousness. It’s all about rules. If the rules changed in the middle of the game because the referee suddenly decided he didn’t like them, sport would become exactly the kind of farce that public health pronouncements have been recently.

These two developments were the crowning glory of the Mental. With corona, both were relegated to the sidelines. We had people who claimed to be scientists insisting that testing was not required while pursuing arguments that were clearly illogical at first and then empirically wrong as things unfolded. Science was replaced by dogma. Phrases like “100% safe and effect”, “trust the experts”, “listen to the science” have nothing whatsoever to do with the Mental Consciousness. They belong to the Magical. They are mantras whose purpose is to focus the will. The Mental does not care about the will. A scientist might wish for an outcome as much as they like but logic, reason and evidence are the arbiters. This does not mean the will has no role. In takes willpower to get up every day and go to the lab. But, unlike Magic, will is not the determining factor for the Mental Consciousness.

Interestingly, there is one way in which the Magical and the Mental feel similar and that is the question of focus. To do Magic properly and to engage in extended empirical testing requires focus. But the focus of the Magical is to empty to the mind, at least to empty it of everything except the single point of focus. The Magical retains the single point of focus until it is no longer required. Meanwhile, the Mental is exploratory. It moves. It gets from point A to point B. Is it a coincidence that the modern West invented railways? I don’t think so. I think it was the external manifestation of the Mental Consciousness which must always be going somewhere. Moving. Progressing. Again, we see this in decadent form in the modern West where pie-in-the-sky, hail Mary projects are launched time and again at enormous expense. This is the Mental Consciousness’s desire for movement at any cost.

The focus of the Mental is its strength and also its weakness. It leads somewhere but that somewhere now takes the form of hyper-specialisation where experts know more and more about less and less. They end up down the rabbit hole of some sub-sub-sub-discipline unable to connect their work back to a larger, more holistic meaning. This kind of solipsism has always been a risk of the Ego-driven Mental Consciousness. If the Magical and Mythical are about an egoless state which is inherently connected to the “world”, the Ego of the Mental can all too easily wander off into the forest of abstractions and end up isolated and alone with no way back. In this way, the phrase mental illness has an interesting double meaning.

Summary

Although for clarity’s sake I have analysed them separately here, in everyday life, the Magical, the Mythical and the Mental are all mixed up to a certain extent. Even the most disciplined team of scientists are still human beings with emotions and dreams. The trick is to ensure that the emotions are not driving results that must be predicated on logic and evidence and, conversely, that logic is not suppressing emotions and dreams that are valid and need an outlet.

What is required is Integration. That’s what Jung was getting at with the concept of Individuation but the problem with that concept is in the word individual because, as Jung himself knew, the focus on the individual is itself a problem of the Mental Consciousness. We need to get over the Ego without abandoning it altogether. Otherwise, we slip back into irrationality. There must be an integration between the Ego and the collective and also back into time. That’s what the Integral Consciousness aims for. More on that in a future post.

I deleted my twitter account a few years ago but every now and again I’ll end up on twitter by following a link I find somewhere on my internet travels. People who have visited twitter know that it has a “What’s happening” section on the right hand side which is mostly filled with paid propaganda. You know the kind of thing – “Hollywood celebrities reveal why eating bugs is super cool”; “10 reasons why using air-conditioning is worse than kicking puppies”. But the section also includes trending words and phrases and so it was another “coincidence” last weekend when I happened to be on twitter and noticed that the phrase “Patrick White” was trending after I’d just finished writing a couple of long blog posts about him. I decided to click and see what people were saying.

It turned out that some celebrity with lots of followers had asked for recommendations to Australian literature and numerous people had responded by telling her to check out Patrick White. What was particularly interesting, though, was that the recommendations were almost universally something like this: “I don’t understand/like Patrick White. But he won a Nobel Prize, so he must be good.”

This is yet another example of an Appeal to Authority. Rather than recommend an Australian author that they actually like, people felt it more appropriate to recommend one they didn’t like but who had been formally recognised by the authorities. This was a dynamic White was well aware of and apparently he had strongly considered rejecting the Nobel Prize for the exact reason that he didn’t want to become one of those writers that people read just because he was officially certified. No doubt he is turning in his grave as we speak.

In any case, the responses on twitter didn’t surprise me because I had noticed the same problem in reading some of the longer reviews of White. Most people don’t understand his books and if you don’t understand what he is doing you can’t appreciate it. White was doing things in his books that hadn’t been done before. Unless you know what those things are, you can’t parse the book and grasp the bigger picture.

That is what I was getting at in my recent post about White’s book, Voss. I barely even scratched the surface of interpreting the themes in the novel itself. Rather, I was trying to provide a high level understanding of how to parse the book. This requires some knowledge of the theory of stories as well as a knowledge of some classic literature and, arguably, some Jungian theory too. Without these, it’s not possible to understand White in the same way that you can’t just start learning calculus one day unless you have a solid foundation in geometry, trigonometry and algebra.

The reference to maths here is directly relevant to another important development in modern thought which is Quantum Mechanics. My maths is nowhere near good enough to validate this claim, but I’ve heard it said that the mathematics of Quantum Mechanics is quite simple and elegant once you get your head around it. Thus, even though the concepts of Quantum Mechanics violate our common sense understanding of the world, the maths is quite straightforward. I think the same is true of White. It took me a long time to unpack Voss, but once I did I could see the elegance of the underlying structure and, crucially, that the structure built on top of what was already there historically. White did not throw all the rules away, he added to them and extended them in the same way that Quantum Mechanics built on and extended the science of physics. These developments were not the arbitrary whimsies of people with too much time on their hands. They were responses to the larger historical and social context.

Of course, both White and Quantum Mechanics are not understood in the general culture and this is where Gebser and systems thinking come into the picture because they both believed that what was really going on was that we had reached the end of the road with the old ways of thinking and it was time to move to a new paradigm. That new paradigm is not a break with the past but a response to it. The 20^th century showed exactly what happens when you try and break with the past and declare a Year 0 (I suppose the French Revolution had already foreshadowed this lesson). Spoiler alert: everything goes to hell. We don’t need to reject the old thinking. On the contrary, it’s only through an understanding of that old thinking that you can follow the path into the new because the new came out of the old.

What we are talking about here is education. To understand White, you need a certain education that you bring to the task in the same way that you need an education in maths and science to grapple with Quantum Mechanics. If we assume, with Gebser, that both White and Quantum Mechanics represent a new form of consciousness, it follows that a new kind of education might be required to bring that about. What might that education look like? Before we try and answer that, let’s do a lightning history lesson on the modern education system.

Viewed in historical terms, our current system of education is both very new and also very unusual. In terms of years spent in education, we are the most educated society in history by a long way. No other large societies achieved universal education beyond elementary level.  Even as recent as the pre-war years, the majority of students in western countries did not finish high school and only a tiny minority would go on to higher education. Nowadays, a significant fraction of students in western countries will go on to university. That’s historically unprecedented.

No doubt there were many good intentions and high ideals in relation to the idea of universal education. But, as G K Chesterton pointed out, the two main drivers for universal education in most countries were the fact that child unemployment had become widespread due to increased productivity from industrialisation and automation. Children who were out of work would often turn to crime or get themselves into other kinds of trouble and so universal education became a way to get them off the street.

The second driver was the desire by the State to get the Church out of education. This was a long battle and was a big part of the reason why Britain and France were behind Germany. Germany would later have its own fight with the Catholic Church in what was called the Kulturkampf (yep, the culture wars are nothing new). Of course, the State eventually won the battle and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Prussian system was partly inspired by the Chinese system that goes all the way back to Confucius. Europeans thinkers such as Voltaire had just started to learn about Chinese culture and history and the meritocratic system of education that had been instituted in China all those millennia ago appealed to the thinkers of the 18^th century. That system was never designed for universal education. It’s purpose was to educate bureaucrats in the tasks required of them in the administration of the State. Exams were there to determine who got a job in the civil service. Since only a small fraction of the public could become bureaucrats, it made no sense to educate them as such but that’s what European countries accidentally ended up doing by rolling out universal education in the late 19th century. Is part of the reason why we have all these bureaucracies these days simply because we educated so many people in a system designed to produce bureaucrats?

Within Gebser’s model, this all fits into the Mental Consciousness. The bureaucracy is, in fact, the ideal organisational structure for that way of thinking. It makes everything explicit, concrete and rule-based. It’s no coincidence that a system partly designed by Confucius would work because, according to Gebser, he was the leading exponent of the Mental Consciousness in ancient China in the same way that Plato, Socrates and Aristotle were for the West. Thus, the modern education system also had its exponents among the intellectuals such as Fichte, Humboldt and Voltaire.

Let’s summarise.

The modern education system in the west is a very recent development by historical timeframes. It emerged via a conglomeration of social, economic and political factors. It was based on a style of education aimed at training bureaucrats for the boring, mundane work administering the state but got rolled out to everybody in western societies as universal education became the norm. This style of education fits into the Mental Consciousness as seen in the strict, rule-abiding discipline that was followed.

Here’s the problem from a Gebserian point of view. At exactly the same time we were rolling out a form of education based on Mental Consciousness, the Integral Consciousness was starting to appear. The modern education system was already out of date by the time it started. If this is true, it raises the question of what type of education is required for the Integral Consciousness. Here is one guess at an answer.

Let’s take Quantum Mechanics and Patrick White as our starting point and let’s assume, as I believe, that they are both paradigm examples of the Integral Consciousness. As we are trying to teach Integral Consciousness, we start there. The first thing to note is that an Integral understanding of both is only possible if you grasp the historical precedents that led to them. In the case of White’s Voss, the main historical precedents are Goethe’s Faust and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. But in order to understand Faust, you must have read the Book of Job and in order to under Pride and Prejudice you probably need to know Romeo and Juliet as a bare minimum. You also need a basic technical understanding of literature and storytelling and modern psychology. Based on all this, we can surmise the following syllabus; the minimum set of requirements to parse what White was doing in Voss:

The Book of Job
Faust
Romeo and Juliet
Pride and Prejudice
The Hero’s Journey and 3 Act Story Structure
Basic Freudian and Jungian psychology

We could do a similar thing for Quantum Mechanics. I’m not in a position to write it, but I think it would look something like this:

Pythagoras
Euclid
Newton
Einstein
Algebra
Trigonometry
Calculus

Note that these syllabi also entail a history lesson as the locating of things in historical context is crucial to the Integral Consciousness. Thus, rather than just teach the Pythagoras theorem and how to use it, you have to understand what problems Pythagoras was trying to solve. Same with Newton. Same with Einstein. In doing so, you place Quantum Mechanics in its historical context and we give it meaning as the result of real people grappling with real issues.

This raises the question also for the student: what issues are you grappling with? Why are you learning Quantum Mechanics? Why are you reading Patrick White? Are you doing it just to get good grades which you think will lead to a well-paying job? Do you need it for some practical engineering problem? Are you trying impress your friends and family? Are you trying to figure out the meaning of life or the secrets of the universe? Are you just curious? All these and more are valid reasons and by making them explicit you also put yourself into historical perspective. Pythagoras, for example, would have thought it pathetic to learn something just to impress others. That was called sophistry back in the day. For the Pythagoreans, there was no vocational education, there was only spiritual education. Thus, to remove the Pythagoras theorem from its spiritual/historical context is to miss the most interesting bits.

All of this might sound impractical. But without this understanding, what happens is that people perceive writers like Patrick White as “breaking the rules”. Then everybody decides that the way to write modern literature is to break all the rules and churn out stream of consciousness vomiting the contents of their mind onto the page and calling it high art. Thus, what gets called modern literature explicitly rejects any form of structure. It throws away all the old rules and replaces them with, well, nothing.

That is not what Patrick White did. In many respects, he was a very disciplined writer who followed the rules to the letter. He didn’t throw away the rules, he built on top of them. That is an incredibly important distinction because everywhere in the modern world we see the old rules being abandoned. This is, in fact, exactly what our modern elites do all the time in all areas of life, not just the arts. That’s how we got the unprecedented idea of lockdowns and the equally impossible idea of a vaccine stopping a respiratory virus. There was never any evidence these would work; no foundation in history or science. They just got wished into existence while all the old rules of public health were thrown in the bin.

The mindset that encourages such things to happen is the mindset taught by modern education. It’s a mindset that explicitly rejects or problematises history. As a result, it has no clue that the new developments in the culture (Integral Consciousness) were built on the foundation of the old. That’s what our modern elites believe. They were educated to think that everything old is wrong. Accordingly, the “new” ideas they come up with are completely untethered to history, to culture, to common sense and to practical reality. Because those ideas don’t make any sense, the public doesn’t understand them. So, they are fed through the propaganda machine which turns them into the form we see in the public discourse; an endless stream of hysterical fear and dread whose sole purpose is to discombobulate the public into bewildered acquiescence.

In the face of the constant exposure to absurd ideas and feverish propaganda, the public is naturally tempted to fall back onto the safe old ideas which, even though they got us into this mess in the first place, are at least understandable. Thus, modern society swings back and forth between demented neophilia and reactionary populism. This is a system without a future. It’s falling apart before our very eyes.

So, even though Gebser talked in abstract terms of “consciousness” and “spirituality”, the Integral Consciousness has a very practical element and tying modern developments back to history is a crucial part of the picture. Only by understanding that past can we track where we might be headed. Gebser’s message was the same as Jung’s. Either we educate ourselves properly and face the future standing up, or we get dragged through the mud kicking and screaming. Currently, the west is choosing the latter option but it doesn’t need to be so.

With my recent discoveries of Patrick White and Jean Gebser, I’ve been feeling a little bit like the children in the C.S. Lewis story “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe”, although instead of going from a world that made sense into one full of magic and mystery it’s been the other way round and things that haven’t made sense (pretty much everything happening in western society these days) have started to become clear. I still haven’t quite finished off Gebser’s book The Ever Present Origin but, as I mentioned in a recent post, my experiences in linguistics, cognitive science, science and technology and more recently Jungian theory have all meant that I had reached almost identical conclusions to Gebser and so his concept of Integral Consciousness already made perfect sense to me. In this post I want to give my introductory outline of what I think Integral Consciousness is.

There are a couple of preliminary definitions to make at the start. First, by “consciousness” we are not just referring to waking life i.e. the set of things we are capable of being consciously aware of at any one time, but rather the set of all faculties available to individuals and societies. Within this model, there is no “unconscious” in the sense used by modern psychology. Rather, there are other faculties or forms of consciousness which are sublimated. These consciousnesses that are sublimated show a pattern that can be defined. That’s the discovery that Freud, Jung and others found in the early 20th century. They called it the unconscious, but actually there are multiple sublimated consciousnesses sitting beneath the dominant consciousness of the West: the Mental.

Gebser identifies 5 types of consciousness with the historical order in which they arose: 1) the Archaic; 2) the Magical; 3) the Mythical; 4) the Mental; 5) the Integral. This leads us to a second vital assumption. Just because these are placed in historical order, it does not mean that any linear progression or evolutionary “advancement” is implied. The chauvinism of European culture during the colonial period relegated societies practising the older forms of consciousness to inferior or less evolved status. As we will see, this makes sense within the Mental Consciousness of the modern West which views time as linear and progressive. Thus, anything old is by definition worse than anything new and history marches onwards towards utopia. That’s what most educated people in 19^th and early 20^th century western societies believed and that belief was tied in with a series of invalid ideas around race, fatherlands and soil. We all know what happened as a result of those ideas.

The assumption here is that each consciousness is universally available to an individual or culture but individuals and cultures display a dominant consciousness. Even if something “new” appeared at a historical juncture, that “new” consciousness must have been latent in human nature at prior periods. It follows that, in theory although not in practice, any human should be able to become proficient in a particular configuration of consciousness. We know this as a simple empirical fact in the modern west where immigration has shown that people from all parts of the world can become proficient in the dominant western consciousness which is the Mental. A Chinese friend of mine once told me that the Chinese call a Chinese person who moves to a western country and becomes like a westerner a “banana”; yellow on the outside and white on the inside. That “inside” is consciousness.

For our purposes here, we can summarise the basics of each consciousness as follows:-

Archaic: This is the domain of timeless non-duality. To speak of it breaks the non-duality. Therefore, we can’t speak of it. (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent).

Magic: egoless, timeless, spaceless. Primary social organisation is tribal. Freudian psychology applies here. It’s the domain of instinct, emotion and sexual drive. In its highest form, it uses intricate and highly effective rituals to harness (magical) energy. Concepts for “energy” like qi, ki, mana belong here.

Mythical: cyclical thinking based on nature, the seasons, astronomy and cycles of life and death. Primary social structure is small scale agriculture. Jungian psychology of soul (psyche) belongs here especially as it relates to myths and the resultant “personality” archetypes like ruler, lover, warrior etc.

Mental: everything from the Dionysian rites, Plato and Aristotle up to quantum physics. The primary psychological development here is the Ego which reaches its apotheosis in Faust. An extreme separation of subject and object not seen in other consciousnesses (which finally collapsed with Quantum Mechanics). The idea of “progress” and linear time comes to dominate.

Assuming that all these are latent possibilities in us at any one time, the way to think about the emergence of different configurations is not an either/or divergence. We don’t completely “turn off” one type and “turn on” another. Rather, each type of consciousness is a kind of Focus of latent capabilities. We focus on and thereby become aware of the things that our consciousness determines are of high value. We defocus on other things but that does not mean they are not there. On the contrary, as we will see, modern western society is full of Magic and Myth even though we still think of ourselves as perfectly “rational” and “scientific”. Anybody who has lived through the last two and a half years doesn’t need any more evidence to be convinced of this fact.

One way to represent the idea of Focus is as follows:

The tribal societies that are based around the Magic Consciousness such as Indigenous Australian, Native American and Native South American have the Magic dominant while the other types of consciousness are latent. Some societies historically began to move from the Magic into the Mythic giving us something like the following which is a transition period between two types of consciousness. The Magical is still acknowledged as valid but the Mythical is coming to dominate:

Eventually, the Mythic gives way to the Mental. Ancient Greece is our paradigm example of that. By then, the Magical has become latent (although the Dionysian rites are a classic example of the Magical) while the Mythical way of thinking still has some influence:

Finally, we get to modern society which is the one we all know best. The ascendancy of the materialist philosophy in 19^th century Europe represents an endpoint, the most extreme manifestation of the Mental. All remnants of the Magical and Mythical, which were by then exclusively embodied in the Church, are done away with, at least as far as educated people are concerned. This is the age of heroic materialism manifested in the external world in bridges, railroads, telegraph, tanks, machine guns and all the rest. It would look something like this:

But this picture is not quite true. As I noted in a previous post, European society had already begun exploring the “unconscious” from the beginning of the 1800s. But what Jung called the “Unconscious” is simply the Magical, the Mythical and the Archaic. Thus, the explosion of interest in Greek, Norse and other mythology in the 19^th century represents the re-awakening of the Mythical. The interest in eastern philosophies and religions relates mostly to the Archaic. Meanwhile, the burst of interest in the “occult” represents a re-discovery of the Magic consciousness. These types of consciousness had been explicitly suppressed by the Church during the two millennia long development of the Mental Consciousness.

This leads to another important point. If this is all correct, then it follows that in order to manifest a particular type of consciousness in its “purest” form, we must suppress the others. Focus comes through Discipline and Detachment. We have to detach from the other types of consciousness and apply discipline to the one we are pursuing in order to manifest it in its purest form. Thus, the military-like discipline of scholars in the 19^th century pursuing materialist philosophy led to a boom in new ideas. The same discipline among the engineers saw the construction of railways, bridges, skyscrapers etc.

But the discipline was not just confined to the intellectuals. The workers in the coal mines, in the factories, on the farms, and the soldiers in the military displayed extraordinary discipline relative to historical standards. But it was a discipline that came at a price and one of the prices to be paid was to detach oneself from the emotions (associated to the Magic consciousness). There is no room for emotion when you’re toiling away in a coal mine for 12 hours a day. It’s simply not possible to do that job without an extreme level of detachment and discipline. This suppression of the emotions was what came to characterise Victorian society. Its downside could be seen on the streets of London in the tolerance of rampant poverty and suffering (including child labor) or in the prisons of convict Australia where horrendous conditions held sway. The suppression of the emotions would later make Freud and Jung famous as they began to treat the various psychoses that resulted.

It was that same discipline and sublimation of emotions that enabled the trench warfare of World War 1 and saw millions of young men spend 4 years running into machine guns. The same discipline saw the development of the atomic bomb.

The 20^th century was the end of the line for materialism not just for these obvious reasons but because the initial burst of new discovery had already ended from within science itself. Part of the motivation for systems thinking was to analyse why materialist science had stopped producing results.

For all these reasons, the end of WW2 was the end of the extreme materialist phase of the Mental Consciousness but also, according to Gebser, Spengler and others, the end of the dominant phase of that consciousness altogether. The difference between Gebser and Spengler is that the latter saw this development as the end of the West while the former saw it as the prefiguring of a new consciousness: the Integral.

In the post war years, what we see is a de-focusing of the Mental Consciousness and that de-focusing has been getting more intense in recent decades. We see this in the fact that there have been practically no major scientific or technological breakthroughs in the post war years. In the broader culture, there has occurred the loosening of social norms but these “loosenings” are the opposite of the discipline that I mentioned earlier. Focus = discipline + detachment. The detachment which enabled the Mental Consciousness to become hyper focused was detachment from the Magical and the Mythical. As the Mental has become de-focused, the Magical and Mythical have returned. I mentioned in a recent post the Mytho-Poetic Men’s Movement run by Robert Fry and James Hillman. This is just one of many examples of the Magical and Mythical being explored in the post war years giving us something like this:

In the last two and a half years of the corona debacle, it looks more like this:

Of course, we don’t call it Magic. We’ll call it a mass formation psychosis which has a nice scientific ring to it and sounds legitimate to our rational biases. But the corona hysteria fits perfectly within the technical definition of the Magical Consciousness. It was the unleashing of energy in a coordinated and focused manner. The fact that it was not done on purpose means it is a kind of black magic. Tribal societies that practised the high form of Magic Consciousness had their own strict discipline about the matter for this exact reason. When you loose magical energy without appropriate safeguards it bounces back on you. Even cheesy Hollywood movies know that much. Thus, corona can be seen as the result of western societies mucking around with magic (propaganda and advertising are two prime examples) without the appropriate safeguards.

When viewed this way, we can see that the postwar period has been a time of experimentation with Magic Consciousness in western society. But this experimentation was entirely accidental and “unconscious”. Nobody knew they were doing it because we don’t believe in magic.

One of the key components of the Magic Consciousness is a lack of ego. Another way to think of this would be an almost complete relaxation of the distinction between subject and object, one of the cornerstones of the Mental Consciousness. Obviously, tribal peoples knew the difference between themselves and the animals that they hunted. But the Magical Consciousness implies what we would think of as a radical lack of separation between the individual and the world.

Maybe you’ve been to a music concert and had the feeling of being “swept up in the music” in some kind of “out of body experience”. That feeling would have been a permanent state of affairs for those living in the Magic Consciousness. The borders between you and the world seem to dissolve and you’re “in the zone”.  

If sex, drugs and rock’n’roll can give us an insight into the Magical, why not combine all three? This is something you can do in the comfort of your own home. Get together with someone special, pour a couple of glasses of wine, turn down the lights and put some Barry White music on the stereo. If you don’t become one with the universe, you’ll be sure to at least have a pleasant evening. But be careful when dealing with this kind of Magic. Too much of a good thing and you’ll end up like Hunter Biden.

The Biden connection here is no coincidence, by the way. The baby boomers indulged in the Magical but they did so from within the frame of the decadent Mental Consciousness. That decadence began in earnest with Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. The development of the Ego now became hypertrophic and it has continued to grow ever since. These days we see it in the ultra-decadent form of the rampant narcissism and self-aggrandisement that is everywhere in modern western societies. With the loss of the discipline that was present at the height of materialism, the Ego has become completely detached from reality.

The post war years has seen the decadent form of the Mental Consciousness combined with unstructured experimentation in the Magical and the Mythical. The problem with Magic, however, is that nothing comes for free. He who dances must pay the piper. The sex, drugs and rock’n’roll of the baby boomers was fun while it lasted but then the pendulum swung back the other way. The combination of ego-mania and indulgence in the Magical and Mythical without the proper precautions and understanding pertinent to those domains has left us with a society manifesting the negative Magical, Mythical and Mental all at the same time. That is where we are now in the modern West. The lack of scientific advancement in the post war years has now degraded to the point where we look like we’ll barely be able to keep the lights on much longer. We no longer have the Focus, the discipline and detachment, which were cornerstones of the Mental Consciousness.

All of this looks incredibly bleak and it’s tempting to agree with Spengler that the west is on the way to history’s garbage bin. However, it is Gebser’s contention that this is a necessary period of “exhaustion” prefacing the emergence of a new consciousness called the Integral. If this sounds wishy-washy to us, it’s because we are still the inheritors of the materialist assumptions of the 19^th and early 20^th century Mental Consciousness. So was Spengler. So was Jung (although he tried later in life to overcome them). For Spengler, might is right and the world of culture is the survival of the fittest. These make sense from within the materialist philosophy but we should by now be somewhat sceptical of that philosophy. From an Integral Consciousness point of view, these ideas are not wrong but they are context dependent. We need to be aware of the context rather than make blanket statements of “truth”.

For me, this is not a theoretical issue. My entire adult life has been spent in the science and technology fields where learning the limitations of the model you are using is a practical matter and not an exercise in armchair philosophy. Gebser’s idea of the Integral Consciousness resonates strongly with me based on empirical life experience and not on idealist philosophical grounds.

So, what might the Integral Consciousness look like and what would it mean in practice? Here is how I think it could look on the chart.

I have drawn the Archaic, Magical, Mythical and Mental in relatively high position relative to the Integral on purpose. The reason is that the Integral Consciousness does not deny the validity of the other types of consciousness. On the contrary, it accepts them all as valid within their own context and it tries to incorporates them into a broader understanding. The Integral is concerned with connection and context. The account I gave above is an Integral Consciousness account to the extent that it presents each of these in historical context and therefore makes time explicit. By making time explicit we also know that to view these as a linear progression is to view them from within the Mental Consciousness mode while to view them as part of a cycle would be to invoke the Mythical and to view them as timeless would be part of the Magical. The Integral doesn’t attempt to say which of these is “true”. In fact, it views them all as “true” within their own context. They become lenses through which to view the world.

The Focus of the Integral Consciousness is not to believe in eternal truths. That is the price that we pay to get to the Integral Consciousness and it is this that is one of the major stumbling blocks preventing us from moving on from the Mental. There are the people in our society who still believe that “the truth is out there” and the experts can find it and drive us forward to utopia. Then there are the postmodernists who believe there’s no such thing as truth and everything is a power game (a position that follows logically from Spengler and Nietzsche). Both of these are products of the materialist Mental Consciousness that we must transcend.

The Integral has a multi-dimensional attitude to “truth”. It follows systems thinking in looking for heuristics and connections. Gone are “eternal truths”. Truth is now in the integration of multiple perspectives. Truth itself must become multi-dimensional and break out of the dualistic either/or straightjacket of the Mental Consciousness. When that happens, you start to experience what Jung called synchronicities. Truths emerge for which you cannot trace cause and effect relationships. The cause and effect are still there but the chain of events is too complex to analyse rationally. This is what systems thinking referred to a medium number systems. It is in those medium number systems that the Integral Consciousness finds its home. It allows us to embrace complexity and uncertainty without the anxiety caused within the Mental Consciousness of not being able to analyse every single variable and outcome.

By making time concrete, we also transcend it and attain something like the timeless non-dualism of the Archaic. Meanwhile, the lack of singular truth gives us some sense of the Mythical where every polar concept also contains its opposite; a pattern which Jung followed in the anima/animus distinction. In short, the Integral, as the name suggests, integrates all the other consciousnesses but knows that it cannot become them. We can no longer attain the purest form of the Magical Consciousness, for example, without giving up the Ego which we have spent the last two thousand years developing. But we can learn to understand the Magical and to incorporate that understanding into a new consciousness.

This new consciousness will seem inefficient, wasteful and unfocused from within the Mental Consciousness. But the desire to do more things in less time and to achieve infinite growth on a finite planet has already passed. Our entire relation to time will have to change but this is a change that is already underway. Nobody believes in the economy anymore. Just one symptom of this is that companies can’t find people to work in western societies anymore.

You can write that off as decadence and laziness. How dare the millennials demand jobs that are actually meaningful. There’s no doubt that all this is currently manifesting as narcissism but that’s just the leftover egomania of the materialist phase of Mental Consciousness. That should go away pretty quickly now. The West will have plenty of opportunity to learn humility in the years ahead and maybe in that humility we can transcend the Ego and embrace the Integral.