Gebser’s Thoughts on Love
GEBSER’S THOUGHTS ON LOVE Georg Feuerstein Director, Yoga Research Center A Gebser “fan,” Jim Hill, who owns a bookstore/cafe in Carefree, Arizona (of all places), recently called me up to ask me on behalf of his little Gebser study group what Gebser’s thoughts were on love. Apparently they had combed through The Ever–Present Origin and failed to find any meaningful references to the concept of love. They were all puzzled and not a little agitated. I reassured him that Gebser had said quite a bit on love, but that his emphasis was mostly on transparency, as in Zen. After the phone call, I went straight to the Gebser publications on my shelves, to check for myself. Although my initial response had been correct, I felt I should “vindicate” Gebser a little more, and so sat down and translated a few bits and pieces from hitherto untranslated materials, including most of a book fragment on love. The following is the response I sent to the study group in Arizona. Dear Gebser Friends: As I confirmed to Jim Hill over the phone today, it is indeed true that the concept of love is not prominent in Gebser’s work, though he does appear to make more use of it in his later writings. There are, I suspect, several reasons for this. First, Gebser was facing an intellectual environment that was relatively hostile to his phenomenology of consciousness, and so he was understandably keen not to invite further prejudice by using terms that could possibly be interpreted as unphilosophical, uncritical, irrational, or whatever. (See also the last excerpt below, which contains a possible explanation for Gebser’s omission.) Second, the thrust of all of Gebser’s work is on promoting clarity of understanding, transparency of awareness. This lucidity of being can be seen as standing in contrast to love as commonly understood, namely as an emotional, irrational force—rather than the effective presence of the arational. A third element is Gebser’s personal history, which was marked by a quite traumatic childhood: his mother was apparently a beautiful but excessively narcissistic woman who withheld her motherly love from him, which caused him tremendous pain and sorrow. She also appears to have driven his father to commit suicide. Given this background, we can perhaps appreciate why Gebser was reluctant to use the fashionable word “love.” He did, however, say allot about primal trust, which didn’t have the same (painful) undertones for him. As you know,(Gebser spent a good many years in Spain, and he felt a deep resonance with the Spanish character, which is known for its great capacity for sorrow. I am bringing these biographical details to your attention, because we must not idealize or, worse, idolize Gebser. He was not a Buddha—and even then idolization would be out of place. Rather, Gebser was a man who has had a harder life than most people, and whose suffering was likely doubled by his extreme sensitivity. Yet, he won through to a new self–understanding and a new relationship to life, and in this he can be a guiding light to us. Glancing through various of Gebser’s works, I have found the following statements that might be useful in your consideration of how he looked at love. “The three preconditions for winning the Integral Consciousness: (1) Recognition of the new style of thought that has been possible since 1900/27 and which permits such hitherto impossible criteria as polarity, noncausality and acausality, dematerialization; (2) Recognition of the diverse structures of consciousness, which can also lead to individual self–knowledge, at the beginning of a thorough working on oneself: preconditions for 3 are: ego–freedom, sovereignty, genuine love relationship, genuine thou–relationship, tolerance. (3) Silence, meditation, surrender to the Origin (i.e., genuine self–resignation (Uberantwortung).” [From Gebser’s diaries, dated 1970–71, as reproduced in vol. VII of the Collected Works, p. 327. I have followed his curious syntax.] The apersonal can be 44
