Integral Consciousness

Jean Gebser  wrote his magnum opus The Ever- Present Origin more than fifty years ago.  This monumental book is about the structures of consciousness.  He names them the archaic, the magical, the mythical  and the mental-rational.  He writes at the beginning:  "The present book is...the account of the nascence of a new world and an new consciousness.  He calls this the "integral' consciousness which integrates all of the previous ones.  When ones reads a book such as this and meditates on the ideas one understands that the way humans have experienced reality differently.  He writes about Petrarch who in 1339, describes his ascent of Mount Ventoux (southern France) about the discovery of perspective.   Gebser again: "for his time, his description is an epochal event and signifies no less than the discovery of landscape: the first dawning of an awareness of space that resulted in a fundamental alteration of European Man's attitude toward the world."
The idea is that there was a transformed change in the our relationship to space that was different than the previous stage.   Here is Gebser:  "the over emphasis on space and spatiality that increases with century since 1500 is at once the greatness as well the weakness of perspectical man.  His overemphasis on the 'objectively' external, a consequence of an excessively visual orientation, leads not only to rationalization and haptification but to an unavoidable hypertrophy of the "I," which is in confrontation with the external world.  Gebser calls this attitude ratio.  Man becomes the measure of all things.  This is the "Perpectival world that we know so well.

Georg Feuerstein wrote a book that gives an introduction to Gebser entitled Structures of Consciousness which comes recommended.    At the end he writes in a chapter The Spiritual Import of Gebser's work. 
Haste is replaced by silence and the capacity for silence; goal-oriented, purposive thought is replaced by unintentionalness; the pursuit of power is replaced by the genuine capacity for love; quantitative motion is replaced by the qualitative spiritual process; prejudice  is replaced by the renunciation of value judgements, that is to say, the emotional short-circuit is replaced by unsentimental tolerance...

There is much written about Gebser's important work online.  Here is one site.  http://www.gebser.org/ 

The many crises today demand a transformed consciousness and Gebser is one of those who can facilitate (in his writings) this transformation.