Tomorrow: Reading Ever-Present Origin as Contemplative Practice
My annual 'Gebser course,' Seeing Through the World, is a philosophical-spiritual deep dive and inquiry, exploring the embodiment of an integrative worldview.
Dear readers,
Tomorrow is the launch of my annual course offering: “Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness” will run for seven sessions, with optional office hours and an experiential practice space, the “Gebser Lab.”
All sessions are recorded, so you can sign up and catch up at your own pace.
This year I have designed the course in the spirit of poetic fragments, and so while each lessons builds on the previous one, each lesson can also be experienced as an entry point into the class as a whole.
Imagine the course in the shape of a rhizome.
Tomorrow, then, begins with “Origin is Ever-Present: Reading Jean Gebser as Contemplative Practice.”
As Rudolf Hammerli, Gebser’s biographer, has often noted: the name of Gebser’s magnum opus speaks volumes through its brevity: origin is ever-present.
Origin is ever present is, itself a poetic fragment. Already we are invited to pause and consider origin and time, being and becoming, and the nature of their interrelationships.
Having taught Gebser for many years now, this year’s course draws attention to the reading itself as an invitation to slow down to the pace of genuine insight. What happens when we approach Gebser’s koan-like meditations on time—the explorations of history, perception, and conception of it all—like it was a Lectio Divina? What if we held the possibility that reading, when done in this way, and with a potent, catalytic text like Ever-Present Origin, can itself become something like a contemplative practice, a kind of temporal art? By approaching reading in this way, as a path of perceptual-, conceptual- and self-transformation, I believe we can more readily intuit and experience what Gebser called the “aperspectival world.”
What emerges is not a defined set of spiritual practices but an open and creative field of experimentation and relational unfoldment, occurring within the container of the cohort.
Although I want to be brief here, what informs this year’s course this year for me especially is Gebser’s insights into an ‘integral’ spirituality, especially its relevancy to our present moment of civilizational breakdown and the ‘liminal’ crisis of our worldview in transition. In our time, how can religion, the ‘binding back’ or re-ligio, metamorphosize into ‘praeligio,’ an obligation towards and relationship with the diaphanous, originary present?
Finding the Others at Limicon (March 2024)
I wanted to also briefly mention a month-long online event, “Limicon,” beginning March 6. It’s one of the more exciting offerings from the ‘liminal web’ communities to happen in some time.
“We are people living the question: How do we become the humans we need to be, both individually and collectively, to be in service to hospicing the old systems and midwifing the new systems that are emerging?”
Limicon is inspired by the many ‘cons’ or ‘conventions’ that my own millennial generation helped to popularize in the last decade. I’m appreciating the fresher take on how we might come together. The event is self-organized and all activities are voted on by the participants.
I hope to see some of you there.
That’s it for this missive. Please reach out if you need a student/pay-what-you-can link for tomorrow’s course. No one will be turned away.
More updates on the Mutations anthology, manuscript writing, new podcast conversations, and finally announcing the next one-off seminar (topic forthcoming) to follow in the next few days.
Busy times, especially adding on the bottle feedings and diaper changes.
See some of you in class tomorrow!