Barbara Karlsen

Just as there has been a time on Earth when human life and mind were not yet embodied, the higher planes of consciousness may also be waiting their time to become a part of our ordinary embodied reality. The human body in symbiosis with Nature and Cosmos provides a coherent, and unifying ontology for establishing a higher order of consciousness; a state of creative potentiality marked by a common primal power that inhabits and informs the prima materia of all living organisms. Situating the body in an active site of primal consciousness (Nature) and externalizing our formative consciousness (embryogenesis), we influence everything germinal to becoming human. Participation in this context could be said to characterize the fullness of integral or unified consciousness. Through such participation, one could discover a source of wholeness ordering one’s existence and expression that knows no human, theoretical, temporal or spatial differentiation. Like Gebser’s view of evolution and that of Sri Aurobindo, the notion that the ultimate potentials of human consciousness are enfolded in the Origin- make it possible for us to conceive of reorganizing new developmental lines by tuning in to our human origins. This view sees the world of the human and the cosmos as an interwoven primordial reality, where higher and higher forms of consciousness evolve out of a process of involution and evolution of varying planes of consciousness. At each transition, the new power not only evolving out of the old, but also transforming whatever preceded it in creative interaction of pluralism. The blueprint ‘ a supramental knowledge” as Sri Aurobindo describes it, based on a fully conscious identity with the whole. This Supramental knowledge could be said to characterize the fullness of unified consciousness. As consciousness mutates toward its innate integrality, it drastically restructures human ontology, and with it civilization as a whole (Gebser, 1989).

barbarakarlsen@gmail.com