Seeing Through the World - Registration is Open
Join me for 2024's annual Gebser class, starting February 13th.
Dear readers,
I hope you’re having a happy holiday season.
The new year is just around the corner—if you can believe it. Before it arrives, I’d like to make one brief, but exciting announcement: the 2024 online course, “Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness” is now open for enrollment.
You can read all about it and register here. It starts February 13, 2024.
It runs for seven weekly calls, hosted on Zoom, with optional office hours and “Gebser Lab” sessions, and an online forum and syllabus.
You don’t need to be familiar at all with the philosophy of Jean Gebser in order to dive in. That’s what this class is for.
Consider it an invitation to delve deeply into a series of meditations on Gebser’s magnum opus of integral philosophy, The Ever-Present Origin, while you are joined by a community of fellow seekers, practitioners, and explorers of consciousness.
Reading Ever-Present Origin or my own book, Seeing Through the World is not required, but they will be recommended. You are welcome to follow along at your own pace, or even use the lectures as a sort of primer for the text, to be read down the road at your own leisure.
What I hear from students, time and time again, is that the course ends up being more than an exploration of an interesting mid-century poet and integral philosopher.
Gebser’s work, as many who take the class know, is eerily prescient. It talks much about cultural fragmentation and worldview incoherence rife in our own time. It is timely in every sense of the word because it is tapping into the same kaironic moment we are all still in the throes of. It is concerned with worldview transition and consciousness metamorphosis.
I suggest to my readers that Gebser’s EPO as a text is a ‘catalytic read.’ Meaning, a text that has a kind of psychoactive effect on the reader, like the best poetry, or a philosopher who happens to also be a very good writer, can do. That would make sense, given that Gebser himself was also a poet.
Ever-Present Origin is filled with vivid literary and artistic references, so to help us along, the class will be sure to provide supplementary media (from the poetry of Rilke or Novalis, to excerpts from the writings of adjacent thinkers like William Irwin Thompson or Marshal McLuhan).
Three more points.
First, the class is meant to actively bridge connections with our own time and our own context. I am always humbled by the connections and exciting applications my students make within their own fields.
Second, students will have an opportunity to explore the concepts introduced in the lectures during the optional and weekly Gebser Labs, an experiential space inspired by Ria Baeck’s collective presencing practices. This group has become a mainstay of the annual course, and the Mutations community generally.
Finally, third: this year’s class will, especially, be interested in delving deeply into Gebser’s spiritual and contemplative insights. Reading Ever-Present Origin as a powerful contemplative text, a response to the crisis of meaning in our time and an exploration into how we might learn to live in, as Gebser put it in the Rose Poem, “the gentle diaphaneity of things.”
So, to recap. The course will be offering:
Seven lectures, offered weekly on Tuesdays
Two additional, but optional calls each week: office hours with me on Wednesdays (hosted in the evenings) and the Gebser Labs on Thursdays
Online forum and supplementary materials provided (Syllabus and secondary literature)
A vivid exploration of Gebser’s key themes and insights, including “time-freedom” and integral consciousness, ‘systasis’ and diaphaneity
An opportunity to practice embodying these insights in daily life with a community of integral practitioners
The class begins February 13th. Read the full course description here. Alumni receive a $25 discount. Student/hardship rates are available, and no one will be turned away. Send me an email: jeremy (at) mutations (dot) blog.
That’s all for now. I look forward to seeing you all in the new year.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Mutations to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.