Jake Sully, a paraplegic former Marine, and his Na'vi-human hybrid called an avatar

Part Five – The Magic and Mystery of Spiritual Healing

In the integral unfolding, we become more intentionally connected with the magical enchanted self, the mythic traditional self, the mental modern self, and the integral transparent self. We can’t be integrated without all four.

Here is a review of these four structures of consciousness, this time using the cinematically gorgeous and highest-grossing film of all time (non-sequel/adaptation). This is the 2009 James Cameron film, Avatar. I fell in love with it and saw it three times. I am indebted to Mark Allan Kaplan, media psychologist, artist, filmmaker, and researcher, for the following. His article on “Avatar” and the Co-Evolution of Consciousness, Culture, and Society gives examples of the personal and cultural manifestations of Jean Gebser’s magic, mythic, mental, and integral structures of consciousness, which I use here.

Emerging from the primordial mist of archaic consciousness of The Ever-Present Origin is the magical structure of consciousness. This is represented by Avatar’s tribal characters and the cultural worldview represented in them and between them. This is a magical sense of wonder and beauty and a deep connection to nature and to the tribe.

Avatar imagery representing Traditional Mythic consciousness, culture, and society

The next structure of consciousness to emerge is the mythic structure of consciousness, often called the traditional stage. This is represented in the film’s human military characters, their cultural worldview, and their world’s social structures and conventions. This structure often has a black or white perspective, a tendency toward authoritarianism, and strict law and order.

Avatar character representing Modern or Rational consciousness

Next to manifest is the mental form, often called the modern stage. This is marked by adherence to logic and reason, empirical knowledge, and the dismissal of anything that is not objectively verifiable, such as the previous magic and mythic structures and the upcoming integral one. It features space travel and medical miracles.

And finally, the newly emerging integral structure is hinted at in the film’s final moments when the main character leaves his human body that is dying. He goes entirely into his avatar body via transference of his consciousness by and through the mystical World Tree. All we see are his eyes opening in that scene, but we get a sense that he has been to “the other side” and has seen the big picture of the universe. This big-picture awareness is one of the hallmarks of the Integral structure of consciousness, along with the awareness of all the previous structures and their inherent value and limitations, and how they balance one another to present a transparent view of the whole.

Avatar imagery representing the integral consciousness, culture, and society

My Practice of Gebser’s Structures through Whole-Body Mystical Awakening

I regularly practice the experience of Geber’s structures of consciousness through the four centers of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. From this practice, I find the structures expanding out into my everyday life more and more. Here is some of what it has looked like for me.

An approach for my head

Gebser’s mental structure of consciousness focuses primarily on the mind. As a life-long “mind” person, theologian, and voracious reader, I have found writers who have shaped my thinking about the spiritual life. In the second half of my life, they seem to have become more profound such as Marcus Borg, Richard Rohr, Ken Wilber, Raimon Panikkar, and Jorge Ferrer. I learned enough from Ken to find it so transforming for my Christian faith that I wrote two books about it! More recently, I have significantly benefitted from what I might call an enhancement of Wilber’s Integral philosophy in Jean Gebser.

Gebser has given me a new flavor of integral that I find profound and increasingly transforming. I have been someone who has been overly dominated by intellectual concerns. I journeyed for twenty years in valuable professional therapy until, among many other things, at age 60, I realized I was gay and was able to stop repressing and denying my sexuality. That, in itself, liberated me to also stop repressing my own experience of mystical spirituality, which then began the transforming journey I had been waiting my whole life for. Yes, repressing one can repress the other.

It may seem strange that I find in both Wilber and Gebser an intellectual approach that releases me from my intellectual approach! However, it has been important to me to find a theological and philosophical approach to life and Christianity that allows me to feel satisfied enough to embrace it and then go beyond it to the lived experience it points to.

Going beyond the rational has not made me irrational. But rather, it has released my mind to more clarity than ever before by becoming balanced with my other centers of spiritual knowing. With Gebser, I found a valuing of the magic or mystical structure that does not seem to be in Ken’s more hierarchical model. The same applies to valuing the stories, metaphors, and symbols of the mythic structure and the deeper truth behind them to also bring balance with the mental structure.

In my head, I experience the vast, radiant stillness that is God. My mind also receives messages of spiritual knowing from my heart, gut, and feet that are helpful to me and others. At other times, my mind expands to the infinite cosmos and the indescribable “beyondness” of God.

A doorway to my heart

Gebser’s mythic structure of consciousness primarily focuses on our heart. My heart began opening in new ways twenty years ago, at age sixty, as I have previously detailed. I may be a fast reader, but I’m a slow learner! Here, I might mention that Gebser is often better assimilated through his interpreters, so I don’t particularly recommend his annoyingly dense writing. Online resources about Ever-Present Origin and Gebser can often provide brief, understandable overviews.

On the other hand, I have found that the effort required to grasp Gebser’s difficult vocabulary and descriptions and the attention directed at this kind of consciousness itself induced a foretaste of it. In slogging my way through Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin, I found my heart, like John Wesley, strangely warmed. It was less like a growing intellectual understanding and more a type of transmission. This new lightness and expansion in my heart has continued.

Our hearts need stories, metaphors, and symbols to believe in. Gebser calls these myths. As stories, objects, and metaphors are woven together, they give heart coherence to consciousness. Carl Jung (1875 – 1961), influential Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, goes so far as to say that transformation only happens in the presence of story, myth, and image, not primarily through rational arguments. The problem with the word “myth” today is that we think it means “not true.” Richard Rohr says that the deeper meaning of myth is “always true,” and “Like good art, a cosmic myth—like the Gospel—gives us a sense of belonging, meaning, and most especially, a personal participation in it.”

The heart is the center of love, compassion, and bliss expressed in these stories, symbols, metaphors, and actions. These “myths” are not imaginary, they are real. As is the deeper truth that they reveal. We can value and embrace both! The actions of love and compassion are the ultimate expression of the heart.

An energetic surge in my gut

Geber’s magic structure concentrates primarily in the gut or spiritual womb. At ICN, we like to say everyone has a spiritual womb, whether you have a physical one or not. As I like to point out, Jesus referred to the womb (κοιλίας in Greek), saying, literally, that “rivers of living water will flow from the womb of those who believe in me” (John 7:38). This is not to be taken as believing in him exclusively or mentally, but rather the divine-human mystical reality he so vividly represented in a breakthrough way.

Jeremy Johnson writes, “In Gebser’s understanding, integral ‘thought’ does not consider the magical stage “low,” or at the very least finds that spatial mapping unhelpful and even obfuscating. The magic is an ever-present phenomenological expression of time (timelessness), space (interweaving unity), and self (merging and trance, collective identity) and is, therefore, is an expression of being (ontology) that the integral enfolds and super-actualizes.”

Jesus is a true story, a transforming metaphor, and a dynamic symbol of the deeper truth of spiritual reality. When my mind and heart connect with the personal and universal spiritual reality represented in and as Jesus, my gut explodes with my own enchanted divine identity. The divine energy field that has always resided there is released. This is a healing, transforming, mystical, magical energy that liberates me personally and, hopefully, the world around me.

Grounding with my feet

As my feet and body become consciously anchored in material reality, this helps to integrate my head, heart, and spiritual womb in the Universal Christ. This Cosmic Christ is the Christian symbol of divine reality, human reality, and material reality gloriously wrapped up together in seamless unity. The language of my feet is embodiment, my body, the body of Christ, and God’s body, the Cosmos. When I draw energy from the earth up through my legs into my womb and then into my heart, I often feel a movement of expanding energy.

Whole Body Radiating Love Fianl-SAI-sharpen.jpg

When I integrate all four centers of spiritual knowing, I have access to all the information and energy I need to live life at its best.

This incorporates the amazing range of pathways of healing with the structures of consciousness. The integral structure consciously and transparently includes these following avenues of healing:

The mental structure of the MIND creates the marvelous making of the life-enchanting technology and medical science.

The mythic structure of the HEART flows out into care for the hungry, sick, and needy of the world.

The magic structure of the spiritual WOMB radiates mystical healing prayer.

The cosmic embodiment and grounding of the FEET increases our awareness both of the healing energy from the earth as well as the need in modern times for the healing of the earth itself.

There is a variety of healing practices with all four centers

With the mental MIND, we visualize holding others in the light.

With the mythic, metaphorical HEART, we surround them with love.

With the magic WOMB, we transmit the healing energy of the rivers of living water to them.

With the feet, we are anchored to embodied material reality focused on transmission from body to body.

How to know you are in integral mode

We know we are operating in the integral structure when all the earlier consciousness structures, down to the archaical become visible to us. They come online, becoming transparently conscious in our life. I have not said much, up to now, about the archaic structure of consciousness. It is so early in time as a “primordial mist” that it does not seem to be describable. It appears as the undifferentiated consciousness of an infant and our own deep, dreamless sleep. Chuang-tzu, in 350 BC, seems to refer to it as “Dreamlessly the true men of earlier times slept.” Gebser points out that it is “the structure closest to and presumably originally identical with origin,” calling it “the universal consciousness of the origin.” Consciousness is closest to the Ever-Present Origin in the archaic state and then again in the Integral structure, this time in a conscious way. Manifesting today in the transparency of integral consciousness, archaic consciousness might be called transcendence.

To be integral is to live all the stages all the time and never think that one stage is superior to any other.

Awakening Goes to the Movies – Finding Integral in Avatar