The Mutual Indwelling of Divine Consciousness
Integral Consciousness Part 10
Intersubjectivity and the Aperspectival
OK. We’re going to get a little wild today. We’re going to stretch a bit more than usual as we explore what might be somewhat of a mind-bending topic for some of us. If you’re up for that sort of thing, keep reading. If not, truly feel free to do something more enjoyable!
Integral consciousness is the unfolding into a whole new way of being in the world. It comes forth first through integrating all of our previous structures of consciousness as aware and present realities we can access and participate in equally. But the irruption into newness comes through what Gebser calls a “mutation,” which indicates a fundamental change in who and what we are—or what we might become.
This is the unfolding of the integral structure of consciousness, emerging here and now, in the integration of and transparency through all previous structures. One of the most common words Gebser uses to describe this structure is “aperspectival.” An unfamiliar word, but not too hard to understand—at least at first. Think “perspective,” then add the prefix “a,” which for Gebser means “free from.” Free from perspective. Got it.
Wait, what?
How do we become free from perspective? Isn’t perspective basically how we see anything and everything? Isn’t that in many ways our whole way of being in the world? Why yes, yes it is—in the predominant mental structure of consciousness, which is our most recent achievement as a species. While it has served us very well, it has now become deficient and even imperialistic, calling forth the vital need for the next unfolding.
So how do we become free from perspective? Firstly, “free from” does not mean “without,” so we can lay chasing that wild goose to rest. We’re not seeking total dissolution or completely amalgamated unity which erases our perspective into an undifferentiated mass.
To come into the “aperspectival” is to still have perspective, but to not be totally bound and limited to the singularity and referential way of seeing/being. A key component in this for Gebser was experiencing this through the freedom from time. For now, we’re going to leave that exploration for another . . . time.
Today I want to explore the aperspectival in the freedom from individuality—the singularness of individual perspective. Not by dissolving into magical unity or alternative perspectives in mythical polarity, but in the Integral WeSpace of divine intersubjectivity, radical mutuality, and even a sort of cross-fertilizing hybridization of my/our spiritual being. We might call this the mutual indwelling of divine consciousness.
Let’s unpack all that, starting with what I mean by “Integral WeSpace.”
The Integral WeSpace
If you’re been familiar with ICN for any length of time, you’ve heard us talk about WeSpace groups—or maybe you’re even already in one! It could sound like just a nice name for a type of small group, but it is much more than that.
The term “WeSpace” arose from the broader Integral community as a marker for the reality and participation in our shared interior spaces, the felt experience of the collective nature of our consciousness. The experience of WE as subject. Not just our more typical experience of living and knowing from the individualized I in relation to others “out there.”
We’ve found that the most natural way to experience this initially is through the heart. As the seat of our humanity, our heart is inherently relational, and we usually can all relate to an experience of a shared heart. Not “giving your heart away” or self-serving love, but the genuine experience of loving mutuality that seems to create a larger, cojoined heart.
In a WeSpace, the more we enter into the shared field with one another, we can begin to come into the experience of feeling not just our own heart interacting with other hearts, but a participation in the group heart. I begin to feel not just from my own experience, but from yours, and his, and hers. And then with time and practice, even from ours. From the collective heart.
This is moving into the deeper WE. No longer I + You, but a new sort of hybridization. This “hybrid space” is the active participation beyond the confines of the individual self that we can find ourselves moving into when we release the mental grip of our individuality and singular perspective.
It takes a degree of trust—or we might even say faith—to “let down our guard” and open up in this way. Crucially, what we are trusting is not just the singularity of the other individuals in their separate selves (though a level of trust is necessary there too), but rather a trust in the divine reality flowing among us that is always and already present. We might call that “spirit.”
We are not creating the reality of the WeSpace. The WeSpace already is. Spirit is already through, among, and between us. And if we are hiding our heads in the sand of our “separate” self, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. We just can’t see it. Consciousness is not so fragmented.
It is a matter of simply choosing to step into our participation with and as this fuller, more whole reality and perspective. Into our interrelationality.
Interrelationality
“Today there is no longer a predominance of certain perspectivally fixed relationships to an opposite, but even in the natural sciences there is an insistence on the diaphanous and aperspectival manifestation of interrelationships and not merely on the relativistic establishment of relations.” – Jean Gebser
In the deeper WeSpace we move into these interrelationships, a new mutuality that opens us up to a seat of consciousness that is not bound to our own singularity, nor to the learning and sharing of “other” perspectives (relativistic). Rather, we can discover and grow into the manifestation of a new starting place, not just our internal vantage point looking out and moving in a joining of connection from point A to point B. But into a real intersubjectivity, a deeper reality than subject-object reference points.
No longer are we trapped within the singularity of a separate self that sees from only one point in space and time, and must relate everything back into and from that one point.
Now there is a more active cross-pollination. What we may have thought of as our whole individual self was really just a part of a larger constellation. And the divine womb of the world is cojoining us into a new being, built of a body that spans a much greater reality, that crosses time and locality. That encompasses “more perspectives” than we could ever dream.
Our awareness of this larger body, of this multiplicity of intersubjectivity, will mostly be fleeting, especially at first. We might experience a sort of oscillation at times, moving into a felt sense of being and awareness in this larger whole, beyond the boundary of singular perspective. While this is mentally disorienting, our bodies and other centers of knowing are more easily able to embrace this manifold way of being.
And we will find that we tap into it more easily in a WeSpace because we are already moving into the collective consciousness, into the field of knowing and being beyond the individual self—and then perhaps into tasting the new, intersubjective interrelationality. Into our mystical shared embodiment. Participating in the whole body of Christ consciousness, personal, collective, and universal.
Interprayer
No matter how isolated or separated we may feel at any time, in our depths, we naturally know how to participate in this mutual way of being, in this greater flow.
Something in our being calls out when we see it in nature, in the murmuration of birds or the synchronized movements of a school of fish. Our minds want to ask how, but our bodies feel the resonate call to our own accordant participation.
We get tastes of it when we experience synchronicities and “coincidences.” A hint of this larger body. But those experiences tend to be accidental. We can learn to intentionally and actively participate in this harmonic way of moving and being in spirit, in conjunction and cocreation with the collective reality.
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it is actually often through speaking that we find ourselves able to enter this awareness into, with, and from the mutual field. We sometimes think we can only access this in stillness and silence, and while that can help us deepen into a more awakened state of consciousness, we often find that we most come alive together in the dynamic dance of cocreative, collective emergence through actively communicating together.
“Transparent communication is not just about self-expression and ‘me.’ It’s actually about a higher awareness of the whole relational field and an opportunity, each day, to include each other.”
We do this in our WeSpace groups, offering words from this way of deeper knowing. We hear and connect with reality that we come to know—but didn’t know before. It often comes from beyond our individual mind, and we don’t always “understand” it, at least mentally.
Speaking into the cocreation gives affirmation of the collective reality. It takes us beyond just our own internal process. And as we open to this shared spiritual reality, we hear from others and discover resonance, wisdom, insight, and flow beyond our own individual generation, so much more than what could come just from our own particular perspective.
This is challenging because it takes us beyond our mental systems and careful categories with which we generally hold in our perspective. It is reality-stretching. It can feel messy and untrustworthy because it isn’t easily confined to our structures of meaning and perspectival orientations. But speech is always more than the communication of mental ideas.
When we speak, our bodies speak. Our ancestors speak. Our bacteria speak. Our bodies are assemblages of other bodies, inseparable from the worlds and geologies and ecologies and materialities they are already entangled with. The communication theorists tried to think of an effective communicative event as the absence of ‘noise’, but language is inherently noisy and indirect. Every speech-act is teeming with many lives-deaths and many voices. Many other things are going on during an act of utterance that cannot be encoded as meaning.
—Bayo Akomolafe
And so in learning this intersubjective way of speaking and praying, we have to be careful to steer clear of various ways that we have been colonized in our consciousness: the desire or tendency toward overly inhibited performances or enaction, or the impulse to immediately “interpret.” We can’t judge our participation in this way of speaking and moving from the mental seat. But we learn to discern from our whole integrated consciousness.
“It is … our insight into the interconnections of vital and psychic potencies immanent as well as extraneous to us, that is capable of establishing the equilibrium in which our life as a whole can sustain itself and stand the test (‘of truth’).”
—Jean Gebser
The Mutual Indwelling into Divine Consciousness
“The genuine bond between persons goes always through God.” —Jean Gebser
So where does the “divine” part come in here?
As divine reality is interconnected and intertwined with all of reality, we experience it not through coming into contact with a separate and distant God, but in and through all of unified reality—material, human, and divine indwelling together.
This can be a radical transformation of our concept of God for many, following the full implications of panentheism, God indwelling in all of reality. It transforms what we mean by and how we practice prayer. It presences us to the immediacy of God, always with/in/as/from everything we see, do, love, and are.
This is incarnation. The divine indwelling shining forth in all things. From all things. With all things.
And so we find God not just by coming into awareness of the divine within our singular being. But in the experiential participation of the God within all things—universal and particular. In the cosmos but also codwelling in my neighbor. In the personal interrelationality of the divine coming forth not just through me, but through us. Together. In our unique dance of communal divine participation. Deep speaking to deep.
The spiritual body of the interrelation of mutuality, with God as the breath, blood, and spirit among us.
This is the discovery of God in the interconnections, in the between, the linkage, the communion, the indwelling that is not just within my own individual self but flowing in and throughout all. To participate in the divine life is to move into this indwelling, not just as an infinitesimal part of this larger body, but in and as the lifeblood.
A New Heaven and a New Earth
This is not just a nice mystical idea. And it is not just for some kind of spiritual high or cool new way of thinking about things. This spiritual truth is irrupting with urgency and demand, begging us to enter into this new way of being. Our survival may very well depend on it.
Harvard professor of Humanities Homi Bhabha calls it “‘The unstable element of linkage,’ the indeterminate temporality of the in-between, that has to be engaged in creating the conditions for ‘newness to come into the world.’”
Participating in this collective intersubjectivity is not about asserting individual will to affect the entire organism, but learning to operate within the deeper movement and flow of how God is already moving throughout the whole. Becoming more sensitive to the movements of the collective body, not as a separate observer receiving the stimulus from a separate object, but as a member of the body, responding to the divine interflow of spirit moving throughout. A spiritual/energetic part of a greater whole, attached and attuned.
It’s time to live into and from the greater collective realities of which we are a part (but not a separate part.) As we cultivate permeability and further freedom from the illusory boundaries of a separate self, interconnected with cosmic reality—As we integrate into transparency, into the lucidity of being in the fullness of our human reality—And as we interflow with the mutual indwelling of divine reality throughout—Then we participate in the unfolding of integral consciousness, the “restructuration of the entire reality” as Gebser calls it. “A new constellation of consciousness.”
He saw this coming into integral consciousness as “increasing capability, not just of viewing the world as a representation but also of perceiving it as transparency; the supersession of the once necessary duality which enabled the detachment requisite for consciousness-intensification: all these processes of restructuration point to a fundamentally new mode of realization.”
Indwelling into the intersubjectivity of the I, the We, and the All, the Divine, Human, and Material in integrated wholeness. Each belonging, and each making up a vital component of our being in this new consciousness that is the becoming of a new heaven and a new earth so necessary for our world today.
If this series and particularly these last few writings resonate deeply with you, if you feel yourself drawn toward further exploration of deepening into the intensification of consciousness in these ways, please reach out to let me know. Join us in the divine play of enacting the emergent integral structure of consciousness.