Sri Aurobindo as the source of Gebser's own inspiration

Gebser for Aurobindonians koantum Sun 21 Jan 2007 07:03 PM PST Scanned from the April 1993 issue of NexUS: Ulrich Mohrhoff Pondicherry

Gebser came to know the works of Sri Aurobindo long after The Ever-present Origin was written, which makes his recognition of Sri Aurobindo as the source of his own inspiration both remarkable and convincing. (I am not aware of any original thinker, including Teilhard, who comes as close to the evolutionary scheme as Sri Aurobindo as Jean Gebser.)

I took Gebser's reference to Sri Aurobindo (unknown to most participants at the Shippensburg conference because The Invisible Origin is only now being translated) as my "excuse" for introducing this Gebser-oriented audience to the life and work of Sri Aurobindo and to the Mother's work of physical transformation. My two papers, read on the auspicious day of Friday the thirteenth November, received a full spectrum of responses, from the skeptical to the overly enthusiastic. In general I found the exchange of ideas among the thirty or so participants intellectually stimulating. (Almost all of them held degrees, mostly in philosophy and psychology, and many were teaching at academic levels.)

This is the background against which I was asked by Wayne Bloomquist to write up something about Gebser for NexUS. One of my papers was entitled "Sri Aurobindo for Gebserians". Here, then, is what could be called "Gebser for Aurobindonians". It will be more of an abstract than a paper, though...

The second paper I presented at this conference, entitled "Agenda of an Integral Consciousness Mutation / World Transformation" can be downloaded in PDF format. koantum Sun 21 Jan 2007 07:23 PM PST

Rich Sun 21 Jan 2007 07:52 PM PST Ulrich, Good job! I personally find it important to make the link between Gebser and Aurobindo and have posted several related items here. I think we even have a posting supplied by Rod in which Gebser enthusiastically relates his meeting with the Mother. Most importantly, I find in Gebser's work that he fills in critical details about the cultural evolution of consciousness and admire the complexity of his view on evolution which is not simply a projection of the Enlightenment worldview, in which evolution is seen as entirely "progressive".

However, I find that the comparison between the notion of Origin and Supermind more appropriate than SM's relation to the integral structure. (although one could argue about how identical they are once we conceptualize the two) I also find the notion of the "ever-present Origin" important to keep in mind. Because in a certain way the notion of Origin's ever- present proximity to consciousness balances certain millenarian interpretations I have encountered of "supramentalization" which linearly extrapolates Supermind from the vantage point of our mental structure. rich