Bring Gebser to IEC

On May 22 – 27th, 2018, the third Integral European Conference  will be convening in Siófok, at Lake Balaton, Hungary. There will be over 120 presenters, featuring keynotes by Ken Wilber, Roger Walsh, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Raymond Moody, Elisabeth Debold, Diane Musho Hamilton and many others.

The theme is “Allies of Evolution”, inviting scholars, practitioners, and participants from Europe and internationally to contribute to our current understanding, application, and praxis of the evolution of consciousness.

So what does that mean? IEC has invited contributions not only from the Integral Theory world — an integral expression originated by Ken Wilber — but from the larger, “big-tent” field.

My presentation, in the academic track, was officially accepted!

I am humbled, excited, thrilled to be part of the event this year. Incidentally, this will also be my first visit to Europe.

But, as a freelance editor, author, and small business entrepreneur, I will need the help of the community –my fellow readers, writers, consciousness scholars, thinkers, and supporters – to get over there.
 
First let me tell you about my presentation.


BRINGING GEBSER TO IEC

The IEC’s theme for 2018, “Allies of Evolution”, invites that plurality of integral expressions to join the conversation.

My presentation is entitled, “Integral Consciousness: Jean Gebser and Contemporary Manifestations of the Diaphanous World”.

I want to bring Gebser back into the discussion. More expressly: I think Gebser’s work, as an integral philosopher, a phenomenologist, and an intellectual mystic deserves more attention in the integral world for the fruits it bears. For the diaphanous insights on the nature of the archaic, magic, mythic, mental and integral. For the opening of time — past, present, and future — in the aperspectival. In the decade since I’ve begun my journey with Ever-Present Origin, I have come to deeply appreciate an integral approach that retains a sensitivity to art, phenomenology, and deep attentiveness to the latent present, where future becomings, mutations, and transformations lie waiting and whispering.

This “type” of thinking has molded my own methodology, and approach, to understanding the nature of integrality, its meaning, and how to discern the structures of consciousness at work and at play in the world. I think this approach deserves a moment to be heard.

But more than this, I think a Gebser-oriented approach has much to offer the 21st century, particularly the issues we currently face: from climate change and the crisis facing late-capitalism, to the cultural issues dividing us now, to even the reconciliation of the structures towards some dream of “planetization.”

Gebser offers an integrality of multitudes and is in kinship with the likes of Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, and more recently, William Irwin Thompson in that he should be read carefully, in his own words, to hear perhaps even a few distant notes from the future. His integrality is one that takes “leaps”, questions the very notion of developmental progress without abandoning the vital truth of emergence, whose thinking on the structures brings them to life within the reader. To read Gebser, then, is to potentiate a form of intellectual-spiritual initiation in the reader. A kind of literary transmutation of the mind takes place in the same way when one reads The Life Divine or Synthesis of Yoga by Aurobindo, or Hymn to the Universe by Teilhard.

So I will bring Gebser to IEC. Allow a perspective that, in many ways, offers a radically different, yet opening, even re-constituting integral awareness to be present for the Integral Theory practitioners and scholars at this event. I believe they will welcome this dialogue.

So summarize, my talk will present a Gebserian “take” on the structures of consciousness, their non-linearity, their potency in us and in culture today. I invite participants to encounter Gebser’s work—in its own right—by introducing his methodology and orienting them to his unique contribution cohering integral consciousness as “time-freedom” and “diaphaneity.”


As William Irwin Thompson writes, “the transformations of history do not occur as events in history; they occur in myth.” When we search for integrality in the present we must perform an act of deep attunement to the creative expressions of the present, as these works of art crystallize the dynamisms of cultural evolution and transformation. So, lastly—and most importantly—this talk will “bring to bear” Gebser’s insights on the qualities of the integral structure, in search of contemporary manifestations: from remixing the magic and mythic structures in technology, to time-freedom in digital art and cinema, to diaphaneity in the Anthropocene.

Multimedia examples will be used to illustrate, or in Gebser’s words, “concretize”, the latent, yet never more present, integral world.

Much of this work is the subject of my book research, Passages from Tomorrow , to be released later this year. It is also the subject of my editorial projects that are soon to be announced.


WHAT YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS WILL DO
 
I've asked for $3000. Here's what your donations will go to:

- Booking a round trip international flight (around $1000 USD)

- Conference registration package. Includes hotel and food for a full five days. (approximately $1000 USD)

- Additional travel accommodations and costs ($500)

- If we hit a home run and reach the full 3K, the final $500 will go to my wife, Natalie, who would love to attend IEC2018 with me. Her flight costs are already covered (but not in this GoFundMe campaign). This would be paying for her basic conference registration.

Any additional funds, gracefully, go to more time I can dedicate to making this presentation as great as I can, and my book research (the two obviously go hand-in-hand).
 

WHAT I CAN OFFER BACK

Beyond the most immediate and obvious expressions of deep gratitude, I can offer one-on-one conversations ($50 contributions) for those who opt-in to that perk, and two special, pre-conference and post-conference Zoom chats (that’s a webinar) at $5 contributions. 

Everyone will get a personal thank you from me.

I hope this can be an instance to bring the integral and consciousness community together for further dialogue along these topics and ideas to engage in further, fruitful events and publications on moving integral pedagogy and research forward (I’ve got some ideas and announcements to share with you, in that regard).

So, however much you can offer, I thank you.

Thanks for making my life awesome and believing in me, and most of all, believing in the importance of bringing a Gebser-oriented approaches to integrality and research to IEC this year.
 
See you from Hungary.

OTHER MODES OF SUPPORT:

You can always get more involved with my writing projects and receive perks through my Patreon , where I’ve started an live Q&A series, “Mutations”, to soon feature research and book-writing guests.

I also accept crypto donations.

BTC: 3Aod7V8gdHqs3gjyKK3cqwXB4imaw3ekuy

ETH: 0x73E13F05387fdC484ccbeE6C777Dc941e2dd1B5C

DASH: XjwdyNRjCbrBJMUgsGKUMKJfJxpnxwrJA7
 

WATCH MY TALK:

Watch my Patreon livestream, Mutations, where I talk about some of my ideas regarding Gebser, philosophy, and furthering integral culture and pedagogy.