Jean Gebser

Jean Gebser (1905 – 1973) was a prodigy, a student of the evolution of human conciousness, a linguist, and a poet. Born in East Prussia, he left Germany in 1929 to avoid the Brown shirts, lived for a time in Italy and in France, where at age 26 he changed his name from Hans to Jean. He then moved to Spain, mastered the Spanish language in a few months and entered the Spanish Civil Service where he rose to become a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Education. He was also a minor poet. He participated in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the left, barely escaping Spain in 1936. He lived in Paris for a while but saw the unavoidability of German invasion. He fled to Switzerland in 1939, escaping only hours before the frontier was closed. He spent the rest of his life near Bern, where he did most of his writing.

His major thesis was that the stress and chaos in Europe from 1914 to 1945 was giving birth to a new form of human conciousness, and that the clue to this lay in language and literature. He modified this position in 1943 and began to study the sciences closely. His most important book, Ursprung und Gegenwart was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953, and in an English edition as The Ever-Present Origin.

Late in life, Gebser travelled widely in India, the Far East, and the Americas, and wrote half a dozen more books. Gebser became a mystic and died in 1973 "with a soft and knowing smile". (See Georg Feuerstein, Structures of Conciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser, p 32.) Gebser had written in Die Schlafenden Jahre, "When we are born we cry and weep, when we die we should smile."

His work has formed the basis of a number of other important studies, in particular Ken Wilber's Up from Eden, Rudolf Bahro's Logik der Rettung (translated into English as Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster), Hugo Enomiya-Lasalle's Living in the New Conciousness, Daniel Kealey's Revisioning Environmental Ethics, and Georg Feuerstein 's Wholeness or Transcendence.

Gebser's theory is that human consciousness is evolving, and that its evolution procedes by structured jumps and not continously. These jumps or transformations involve structural changes in both mind and body. There are a number of these levels:

1. The archaic structure (before approx. 200,000 years ago)
2. The magic structure (approx. 200,000 to 50,000 years ago)
3. The mythical structure (approx. 50,000 to 1,000 B.C.)
4. The mental structure (stage 1) Philosophy and Theology.
5. The mental structure (stage 2) Perspective and Science.
6. The integral stage