If Consciousness is Evolving, Why Aren't Things Getter Better?

When people ask me what I write about I have a few standard replies, depending on the circumstances and the person asking. But one answer that covers most of my work is “the evolution of consciousness.” Needless to say, in most cases this only leads to more questions, the most common of which are along the lines of “How can you say that consciousness is evolving?” or “Really? What evidence do you have for its evolution?” Or, as the title of this article has it, “If consciousness is evolving, why aren’t things getter better?”

That things aren’t getting better is taken as obvious, and if serious consideration of the idea of an evolution of consciousness depended on arguing that, to the contrary, they were, then I’d have to agree that any such speculation would be doomed from the start. By “things” of course we mean the state of the world, civilization, society. It doesn’t take much to recognize that in multiple ways the world faces challenges today that, as the cliché goes, are unprecedented. Every day the news media reports a variety of crises. It seems that we are, and have been for some time, experiencing what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a civilization’s “time of troubles.” So, given that the general feeling is that we are globally going to hell in a handbasket, it is not surprising that some people are surprised when I speak of an evolution of consciousness.

Fortunately the notion of an evolution of consciousness does not depend on the state of things being better or worse. It does not depend on the state of things at all – quite the contrary, in fact. Consciousness, its evolution, and the world in which it finds itself, are of course linked. They are not separate, watertight  realities. But I don’t believe we will find evidence for an evolution of consciousness on the news, or in the latest headlines or tweets, or on Facebook, or other social media. Or, to be more precise, while evidence for an evolution of consciousness may be found in this way – just as it may be found in other ways - whether or not some kind of evolution of consciousness is taking place, should not be decided on solely by what we can find here.

I believe that even if all the evidence available through whatever sources announced the imminent collapse of western civilization, this would not necessarily mean that consciousness doesn’t evolve, merely that we had not grasped the meaning of its evolution. Consciousness can evolve and things can get worse – or better. The one is not a gauge of the other. It is not the case that  an “evolution of consciousness” necessarily means that “things are getting better,” and in any case how we decide whether they are getting better or not is another question entirely. Changes in consciousness may bring about a state of things that make possible changes in society that we - or the people at the time, if we are looking at this historically - consider beneficial. Or they can precipitate an upheaval that throws everything into chaos. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked that “the major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”[1] As Whitehead suggests, what is wreckage for some may be the raw material for new creation for others. When we determine whether things are getting better or worse, we must remember that all such valuations are made from a peculiar perspective, which, like all perspectives, is, by definition, limited.

Here I want to make a distinction between an evolution of consciousness and what we can call “history.” If this is too neutral a term, then we can say “progress,” or “social change,” or “world-betterment.” This is aimed at making the world a better place, which most intelligent people in some way desire, even if they are often unsure as to how to go about doing this. The other is a recognizable change in the shape and character of consciousness itself. As I’ve tried to show in some of my books, this kind of change in consciousness can, I believe, be traced throughout our history. We can say that one is about the form or kind of consciousness prevalent at a particular time and the change from this to another dominant kind of consciousness. The other we can say is about what the people experiencing this consciousness did with it. One is the way in which consciousness experiences the world. The other is made up of the ideas, thoughts, concepts, beliefs etc. consciously held by this consciousness.

I am of the opinion that the idea of “making the world a better place” is of relatively recent origin – say from the 1700s on - although some sense of it can be found before this. This makes it a very modern idea, one predicated on the recognition of human agency as a real force at work in the world. Although we now assume this and really question it only when faced with some insurmountable obstacle, it was not always the case. With few exceptions, for centuries men and women simply accepted things-as-they-were with the same unquestioning endurance that they accepted the weather or an animal acquiesces in its fate. The idea that this did not have to be so, that human beings were able to take action and change their circumstances, is itself, I believe, a product of a change in consciousness that took place around the seventeenth century, a shift that endowed humanity with greater freedom and control over its destiny, but which precisely because of this, also confronted it with perhaps its most daunting challenge.

There are many different approaches to the idea of an evolution of consciousness. Even if we start a history of this idea with the beginning of the twentieth century – as I do in my book A Secret History of Consciousness – the number of different versions we get is considerable. I start this history at around 1900 because by this time the idea of evolution itself had taken hold of the western imagination. I should point out that the kind of evolution I am speaking about isn’t Darwinian, although of course Darwin’s version was the most well-known. It was also around this time that the use of the term “consciousness” to talk about our inner, subjective worlds started to become prevalent.

What we speak of as consciousness today would have been spoken about as “mind” or “spirit” at an earlier time. And while “mind” and “spirit” are resistant to the kind of scientific study that characterizes our own time – and which has often led to their being considered unreal, at least by some scientists -  “consciousness,” as something more abstract, seems more amenable to it. At least scientists find it less awkward to say they are studying consciousness than to say they are studying spirit.

A quick run through of some different exponents of some idea of an evolution of consciousness gives us quite a few names. Here we find, in no particular order, R. M. Bucke, author of Cosmic Consciousness; the Christian palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin; the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo; the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy; Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, one of the founders of Theosophy; the philosopher Henri Bergson; the playwright Bernard Shaw; the biologist Julian Huxley; the Egyptologist René Schwaller de Lubicz; the spiritual philosopher Ken Wilber; the existential philosopher Colin Wilson; Samuel Butler, of Erewhon fame; and the esoteric philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, among many others.

Some of the versions of an evolution of consciousness presented by these people are similar to each other, some are complementary, and some radically different. I talk about some in my books and some I have ignored - egregiously according to some of my readers . Some are scientists, some philosophers, some esoteric teachers, some writers, some have a religious background, some do not. I point this out to show that the idea of an evolution of consciousness is not the property of one or two thinkers, and that science or philosophy or mysticism have no monopoly on it.

It appeals to a variety of minds, all of whom, though, share an appreciation of its dynamic character, the emphasis on growth, development, “becoming” rather than “being.” Two proponents of an evolution of consciousness whose ideas I have found especially fruitful are the philosopher of language Owen Barfield and the cultural philosopher Jean Gebser.

Barfield came to the idea of an evolution of consciousness – which he defines as “the concept of man’s self-consciousness as a process in time” - through a study of language, specifically poetry, which, strangely enough, is the same way that Gebser came to it.[2] Barfield spelled this out in a series of books, History in English Words, Poetic Diction, and Saving the Appearances being probably the most well-known. While reading his favorite poets, the Romantics, Barfield noticed something. He saw that the delight he found in reading their lyric poetry was the effect of a change in his consciousness that it produced. It somehow made it more “alive.” This was the effect of their using “figurative language,” that is, metaphor, especially the metaphors the poets used to speak of their soul, their inner world, their feelings and emotions. As Barfield said in a lecture on the subject, these metaphors would bear “not merely reading and enjoying.” There was something more to them. “One could somehow dwell on them.” They altered the way in which he saw the world; it became “a profounder and a more meaningful place when seen through eyes that had been reading poetry.” Poetry, he found, “had the power to change one’s consciousness a little.”[3]

Barfield later came to see that a similar change in consciousness occurred when he looked at language from an earlier time. This language was not intended to have a “poetic” effect, as the language of his favorite poets did. It just seemed to have it. Barfield came to see that it shared this effect with poetry because this earlier language was much more figurative, much more metaphorical than our modern language.

Barfield saw that the further we go back in history, the more figurative language seems, the more metaphorical and poetic. This was the argument of his first book History in English Words. As we move closer to the present time, language becomes less metaphorical,  and more literal. We seem to move from what the literary philosopher Erich Heller called “the age of poetry” to “the age of prose.” Many metaphors that at an earlier time seemed fresh and vital, have now become either clichés, or have become so worn down by use – a metaphor itself – that we no longer notice them and accept them without thinking as figures of speech.

Barfield concluded that while poetry may transform consciousness because it purposefully strives to do this – each individual poet using his imagination to create the effect - early language about the most ordinary things did it too, not because it went out of its way to do it, but because it was in the character of the language itself. And rather than accept that people of, say, the Middle Ages or ancient Greece were all remarkably poetic, he concluded that their language had this “living” quality because the world it spoke of was that way. It was an “age of poetry” not because everyone then was a poet, but because, as Heller writes, it was an age in which “poetry was not merely written but, as it were, lived.”

“The poetic comprehension of life,” Heller goes on, “was at that time not a matter of the poetic imagination at work in the minds of a few chosen individuals, of artists… but was ‘natural’, a matter of fact, of ways of thinking and feeling shared by the whole community.”[4]

Barfield saw that the change from an age of poetry to one of prose meant a change in the way people saw the world, and that this meant a change in their consciousness.

Earlier language is much more “alive” than ours because the people speaking it saw a world much more alive than ours, which meant for Barfield that their consciousness presented a world much more alive than ours. Barfield’s term for this “living” character of perceiving is “participation.” For him, the language of people of an earlier time is “livelier” than ours because the people of that time somehow “participated” in the life of the world around them, in a way that we now only experience occasionally. They were somehow aware of the inside of things, of the inner life of nature, in a way that our more prosaic consciousness, which concerns itself simply with the surface of things, isn’t.

We can, though, get flashes of this “inside.” It can happen as it did with Barfield through poetry – the other arts can also do it – or it can happen through the effects of certain “mind altering” substances. Even something as simple as wine can do it, hence the longstanding association of poetry with the fruit of the vine. Our consciousness is different from that of the people who spoke this earlier language, as it is from that of poets and artists when they are working creatively. It has changed, shifted, moved, or “evolved” from that earlier state to our own.

Jean Gebser came to a similar conclusion through reading the work of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke in the early 1930s (Barfield himself was writing in the late 1920s). Gebser saw that Rilke’s use of language suggested that in the twentieth century, a shift had happened in western consciousness. In a way we can say that if Barfield and Heller recognized a shift from an age of poetry to one of prose – a shift from an age of “living” metaphorical language to a more “literal” “matter of fact” one – Gebser saw that this “prosaic” way of seeing the world was itself starting to change and that the stable, “common sense” vision that it presented was beginning to break down.

What Gebser noted in Rilke’s use of language, and what he began to see in many other forms of human expression at the time, was a movement away from its sequential logical form – a characteristic of plodding “prosaic” thinking - and toward a kind of simultaneity. Rather than one-thing-following-another in a nice orderly step-like fashion, Gebser saw that in Rilke and in other writers and artists – Proust, James Joyce, Picasso – and scientists – Einstein, Max Planck – what was emerging was a kind of vision of “everythingallatonce,” certainly of a world in which past, present, and future were not as stable as they had been.

Gebser spoke of this as an “irruption of time” which he saw as the overall consequence of a new “structure of consciousness” that he argued was appearing in the west. Our own “digital age” which prides itself on simultaneity and instant availability may give us pause to consider Gebser’s idea. His magnum opus The Ever-Present Origin – originally published in 1949 but not translated into English until 1984 – charts in great detail the cultural evidence for what Gebser calls the different “mutations of consciousness” that the human mind has gone through from prehistoric times until our own.

Like Barfield, Gebser believed that consciousness evolved, although he preferred the term “mutation” to “evolution,” to avoid the nineteenth-century notions of “progress” associated with evolution – and I should point out again that Barfield’s evolution is not at all Darwinian or linked to any idea of ‘progress’. I don’t have space to go through the different “structures of consciousness” Gebser depicts; an interested reader can find an outline of them in A Secret History of Consciousness. Here it is enough to say that Gebser believed that the “irruption of time” that he saw taking place from the late nineteenth century on was both the result and the agent of what he called the “breakdown of the mental-rational structure.”

Gebser’s “mental-rational” structure of consciousness is much like the kind of consciousness that Barfield and Heller recognized in the “age of prose.” Barfield and Heller knew that these shifts take place over long stretches of time, and that the passing of the age of poetry into that of prose began in the distant past, perhaps during what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” the period around 500 BC that saw the start of western philosophy and its peculiar focus on logical reasoning and rational explanation.  Both agreed that this reached a kind of apogee in the early seventeenth century with the rise of what we have come to call science. Science we can say is the epitome of the age of prose. In order for it to become successful it had to denude the world of its mythological, mythopoetic character. Science works because it treats the world as a dead object, not a living being, as our earlier, more metaphorical consciousness had. It sees it as a machine, subject to rigid mechanical laws, not something with which we “participate.”

Earlier I remarked that a change in consciousness in the seventeenth century gave humanity greater freedom and control of its destiny, but that it also confronted it with perhaps its greatest challenge. The rise of science marks precisely this change. It is no exaggeration to say that the world has changed more in the four centuries following this than in the millennia that preceded it. To enumerate all the benefits that have come from the development of science and its offshoot technology would be tedious. We see them all around us, from space probes voyaging beyond our solar system to the latest breakthroughs in medicine. We live today in ways that kings of old could not imagine. So, the change in western consciousness at the beginning of the seventeenth century did, it seems, make things better.

Yet this change also led to many of the challenges facing us in our “time of troubles.” The loss of our participation with the world allows us to detach from it and observe it impersonally – the essence of science – but it has also left us, as the novelist Walker Percy said, “lost in the cosmos.”

Gebser believes something similar. The “mental-rational” consciousness structure is the furthest removed from what he calls “Origin,” the ever-present source of consciousness itself. Our radical break with it began in the early fourteenth century; one sign of this, he argues, is the discovery of perspective, which marks a change from the flat, tapestry-like perception of the Middle Ages, to what became our own “space age,” a vision of infinity extending in all directions. This shift enabled man to stand on his own, to confront the world with his own intelligence and will. The computer I am using to write this essay is one result of this. But Gebser would agree with Walker Percy that it also led to our existential angst in the face of a mute universe that seems oblivious to us.

Blaise Pascal, one of the great mathematical minds of the seventeenth century, and also a deeply religious one, recognised this early on. In his Pensées, a collection of notes found after his death, Pascal had written about the new model of the universe arising from a nascent science: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” By now Pascal’s terror has dwindled to a numb complacency in the notion that the universe is meaningless. The respected astrophysicist Steven Weinberg dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s when he announced in his book The First Three Minutes that “the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless.”

So we have a change in consciousness that resulted in many things getting better, but which has also landed us with the greatest challenge humanity has faced: overcoming the passive nihilism that has become our accepted way of understanding ourselves and the world.

Barfield and Gebser believed that consciousness continues to evolve or mutate and that we today are involved in this process. Both believe the meaninglessness behind our cultural and social malaises can be overcome, and that there are signs of another change in consciousness, one that will somehow allow us to reconnect with our source, while at the same time maintaining the independent, free, creative consciousness that was the reason we lost touch with it in the first place.

The loss of what Barfield calls ‘original participation’ , resulting in our modern, alienated consciousness, can be seen as a ‘fall’, but Barfield would say it was a necessary one. Human consciousness needed that separation in order to individuate into our own independent ‘I’s’. Now the aim is to achieve ‘final participation’, a conscious grasp and understanding of participation, rather than our earlier, unconscious immersion in it. This can be achieved, Barfield believes, through a certain effort of the imagination, akin to the change in consciousness he felt when reading poetry. In essence it is a way of ‘reading’ the world, seeing it figuratively, that is, alive, as a kind of metaphor to be grasped rather than an object to be used.

Unlike original participation, this is something we must bring our will and attention to; it requires effort on our part. It is an evolution we bring about, not one that happens to us. Barfield himself found the deepest insight into this process in the work of Rudolf Steiner, but we may read him with profit without having to agree.

Gebser believed that the breakdown of the mental-rational structure was necessary in order for the next structure of consciousness to appear. He called this the "integral structure," because it integrated all the previous structures and completed the "unfolding" of Origin. Gebser’s vocabulary is difficult and his descriptions of the integral structure of consciousness require much effort to grasp; but as Barfield recognized while reading poetry, the attention directed at this can itself induce a glimpse of it. But one fundamental change Gebser speaks of is from our current ‘perspectival’ consciousness to an ‘aperspectival’ one, a shift from a linear, utilitarian, ego-based view to a holistic, contemplative, ego-free one.

What Gebser meant by ego-free was not that we lose our egos, as some forms of mysticism suggest, but that we are no longer limited to them. Our perspective is broadened to include much wider horizons. We achieve what Colin Wilson called a ‘bird’s eye view’; we see from above, and not just what is smack in front of us. We get the big picture, not just the close-up.

Gebser and Barfield knew that such a change in consciousness is not passive and that the people in whom it stirs must make the effort to bring it about. Neither believed in any millenarian ‘singularity’, some event that will trigger the shift and change ‘things’ overnight. Gebser believed that such notions were illusions. ‘Let us not deceive ourselves,’ he wrote. ‘The world will not become much better, merely a little different, and perhaps more appreciative of the things that really matter.’[5] The work of actualizing consciousness remains, whether things get better or not.

My own belief is that any new consciousness will emerge first in individuals and for them it may be as much a burden as a blessing. They will have glimpses of what others do not, and will be driven by needs others find absurd. They will be what Colin Wilson calls Outsiders, people who ‘see too deep and too much’ where most others are near-sighted. Until they understand who they are, they will be  misfits, but if consciousness has a future, it depends on them.

Space will not allow me to say more. I encourage readers to go to Barfield and Gebser themselves or, for an overview of their work, my own books, where you will find their ideas discussed along with those of other thinkers, confronting the same problems. What I can say with some assurance is that if you do, you will find more evidence for an evolution of consciousness there than you will on the evening news.

[1] Alfred North Whitehead Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: G. P. Putnam  1959) p. 88.

[2] Owen Barfield Romanticism Comes of Age (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986) p. 189

[3] Owen Barfield  Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language (1976 p. 3.

[4] Erich Heller In the Age of Prose  (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1984) p. 3.

[5] Jean Gebser, quoted in George Feuerstein Structures of Consciousness (Lower Lake, Ca: Integral Publishing, 1987) p. 166.