Homologies in Spiritual Attitude

Jean Gebser

Translated by Aaron Cheak, PhD

AMONG the many contrasts between East and West, which we hope will be transformed from antagonism into concordance, there is a domain in which not only accord but actual common ground will always prevail. It should now be briefly mentioned. Especially since it concerns the deepest (or highest) roots of humankind; and also because this common ground has been arrogantly denied and silenced through the intolerance and fanaticism of numerous ecclesiastical institutions and so-called religious communities. This common ground is concerned less with what we call the religious phenomenon, and more with the ultimate spiritual reality that both humankind and individual cultural circles participate in according to their corresponding structure of consciousness; and sometimes they are even permitted not only to know this participation, but to experience it as an inalienable grace.

For there is a spiritual domain that does not allow itself to be spoken of with the conceptual clarity and intellectual precision of which we are so enamoured. This by no means implies that the climate of this realm itself indicates imprecision or clandestinity. Rather, it demands that we should be cautious with every expression or statement about it so that we do not ‘talk it to death’, so to speak, and thus devalue its extremely potent yield. This value largely eludes any communicability. It is only possible for commonplace thinking to recognise it on the rare occasion that it finds itself ready, whether overtly or cautiously, to refrain from seeking palpable proof in order to demonstrate its validity and instead becomes satisfied with its pure possibility or feasibility.

What are we dealing with here? Above all, an insight that has largely been lost to the West: that this domain is more than just a realm that surmounts faith and thought; that this spiritual reality, this divine whole, acts through all things—humanity, the world, the universe, and beyond—almost like an everlasting perpetuation and refinement of creation (and thereby also of humankind, insofar as it we can open ourselves up to it).

From time to time, some Europeans, even of our day, have managed to awaken in contemporary humanity the consciousness of their perpetual participation in the spiritual. This achievement is synonymous with the ‘great liberation’ thanks to which both the life and death of the individual can be fulfilled.

Everything intellectually conceivable only has veracity if it has the power of proof. Everything spiritually perceptible only has validity if it has evidentiary character. That which we dare to speak of here is realised beyond the conceptual. Thus, it remains mere conjecture for those who do not dare to transgress the limitations of thinking; whereas for those who perceive, it is the transparency of the ‘ultimate reality’. One cannot make this transparency visible, one cannot see it, but one can perceive it through effortless transcendence of wakefulness [Überwachheit], can become ‘aware’ [gewahr] of it in the most intrinsic sense of the word. It is more than clarity or illumination, more than transfiguration or glorification, more than radiance. One could possibly speak of it as the transluminescence [Durchglänzensein] of the whole. Whoever participates in this is more or less purified, as if melted and remoulded, liberated from the scoria of the soul, from the narrow limitations of mentation, without in the slightest manner being lost to the world through intoxication or ecstatic rapture; rather, whoever participates in this finds themselves perfectly composed, with the deepest sense of trust, and with the sacred lucidity of origin’s ever-presence pulsating through them. Furthermore, all of this occurs without forfeiting the readily existing surroundings, whereby it should also be noted that everything concrete and objective is equally elevated to transparency and thus liberated from opposition. And one more thing must be mentioned, which the individual, depending on approach, will regard either as a mere conjecture or as unverifiable testimony: this [process of] becoming transparent, or this complete assimilation [Aufnahme] into transparency, is in no way an instance of the diminishing of consciousness that occurs in magical unification; it is not an inferior, emotional, trancelike unification (becoming one with the so-called ‘all’ or universe), but rather the intensely clear certitude that the assimilation into the transparency of the whole is grounded in the nonduality [Nicht-Zweiheit] of the spiritual. So it is not unio mystica but advaita, to employ the Sanskrit word again, which is often falsely translated as ‘nonduality’ [Nicht-Dualität]. Incidentally, this shows that it is beneficial to have practiced a clearly differentiated [form of] thinking so that afterwards account can be taken of the experience of transparency, which has nothing to do with the irrational stamp of the mystical, rapturous rush of unification. More will be said on this later.

There are many indications that transparency is not a photic phenomenon [Lichterscheinung] in the sense of visible, environmental light. Graf Dürckheim uses the old circumscription: ‘supranatural light’ [übernatürliche Licht]. Meister Eckhart brings the same idea to expression when he writes: ‘Everything that one is able to think about God, is everything God is not. What God is in and of himself, no one can approach, unless he is moved into a light that is God himself’. Already in the First Letter to Timothy (6:16), Paul the apostle refers to the transcendent or supramundane [überweltlichen] character of this light when he says that God ‘lives in an inapproachable light’. Angelus Silesius expresses himself in the same sense in two of his quatrains (where he avoids the almost blasphemous slip of presuming identification between human and God). The two quatrains proclaim:

God dwells in his light,
the path to which is broken.
One must become the light,
in order to eternally see him.

The second:

I myself must be the sun
and must paint with my rays
the colourless ocean
of the entire godhead.

Wherever liberation from the prison of the mental-rational consciousness is accomplished, we always find ourselves participating in the ‘world without opposites’ and thus of the transparent world of the whole, circumlocutions that constantly indicate the supranatural character of the light, which gives to this occurrence or experience a transfiguring imprint. ‘Only when the perfection of enlightenment has been attained, in which all colours coalesce and are integrated into the highest splendor’, may samadhi be spoken of, writes Lama Anagarika Govinda. And the purpose of the ascetic life of the monks of Mount Athos was to attune themselves to that supranatural reality which was [only] realised when they managed to become aware of the ‘uncreated light’, which due to its quality of spiritual transparency is non-objective [ungegenständlich] and therefore, in a worldly sense, uncreated.

In this connection two warnings must be expressed. These are indications dealt to us by so-called coincidence or fate. To have received them perhaps obliges us to communicate them. They affect both the process of coming-to-transparency [Transparentwerdung] and the character of transparency itself, and therefore the inner disposition and attitude of the individual for the ‘ontological breakthrough’ [Durchbruch zum Wesen], or to express it by other circumscriptions: for ‘enlightenment’, the ‘great experience’, the ‘great liberation’, which in Buddhism and Hinduism are called samadhi and in Japanese Zen Buddhism satori. The first warning is against any intentionality; the second warning is against any regression in consciousness. Both are likely to be of decisive value, especially for westerners.

In the 1930s, a friend of mine, the recently departed sociologist Walther Tritsch, had the fortune to spend six months in an Athos monastery where he was permitted to live as a guest and not as a hermit. He related to me the tragic component in the life of those monks. When, after years or sometimes even decades of ascetic life, they believed to have ‘beheld’ the ‘uncreated light’, they began to doubt, indeed to despair. Was it the true light? Or was it merely a quasi-psychological or phantasmagoric appearance of light? A deceptive ghost light from the ‘devil’, as they say, which they themselves had induced through their continual struggles and desires? Any verification evaporated into mere conjecture.

We know not only from Jakob Böhme but also from Sri Aurobindo and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, that they became ‘aware’ [gewahr] of this ‘light’, this ‘transparency’ or ‘transfiguration’ [Verklärung], spontaneously—which means: without prior preparation and training, but rather as a sudden event. The Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism, to which Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki belonged, attaches great importance to this spontaneity. Admittedly, decades of retreat and asceticism in the monastery can also lead, at the very least, to unio mystica and possibly to ‘enlightenment’.

Be that as it may, whatever one chooses to call this event—the ‘great liberation’, the coming-to-awareness of the ‘uncreated light’, ‘transparency’, or ‘enlightenment’—it cannot be forced. Any deliberate purpose, direction, or effort, even if they have the best of intentions, are obstacles. This does not mean that one should simply abandon oneself. On the contrary, it demands character: that is, vital-emotional, psychological, and intellectual discipline and sovereignty; it requires tireless and persistent work on oneself to further the process of purgation [Entschlackung] and refinement [Läuterung] which, to a large extent, are the prerequisites for entering into transparency. The intention must not be aimed at transparency itself. There should be no intention whatsoever at play. Transparency has always been waiting within us. To try to ‘grasp’ it by means of the forces of consciousness that are currently available to us, but which do not extend to it, is a futile endeavour. Our task, as it were, is to weed [jäten] the innermost ground of our being every day in order to prepare the ‘breakthrough to the essence of being’ [Durchbruch zum Wesen] without straining into the distance after the ‘great experience’. And we cannot do it for our own sake. Although this experience can occur in individuals, in human consciousness, it is nevertheless a manifestation of a consciousness beyond the world [überweltlichen Bewußtseins]. Whoever participates in it is also indebted to humanity: for every grain of transparency that is realised by a single individual intensifies the spiritual power of humanity [as a whole]. To give an earthly home to this all-pervading force, a conscious homeland, is of decisive importance in today’s cosmic moment. Should humanity avoid the collapse into self-extinction, insofar as this avoidance is predetermined, we will generally have to thank those who neither want nor need this gratitude, but who unintentionally, inconspicuously, yet consciously effected this transparency that is beyond reality as we know it [überwirkliche Transparenz]. One cannot simply object that all of this is utopian. It is not. The literal translation of the Greek-derived word ‘utopian’ is: ‘that which has no place’. But I know a few venerable individuals thanks to whom transparency has found a place here­.

One hour after the last sentences of the preceding paragraph had been written, I found an unexpected confirmation of what had been said there in a book by Huineng [Wei-Lang] that was hitherto unknown to me. It is, as Lama Anagarika Govinda writes in the preface [to the volume], the ‘most vivid of all the writings of Chan or Zen literature’ authored by the sixth patriarch in the seventh century C.E. The central theme is the sudden, spontaneous realisation of what Huineng calls the ‘spirit-essence’ (literally ‘self-nature’), which thoroughly corresponds to what has been described here as the ‘supranatural light’ and as ‘transparency’. Leafing through the pages, I stumbled across the following remarks of the patriarch: ‘those who have grasped the spirit-essence [Geistessenz] … achieve liberation … and samadhi, which enables them to playfully solve the difficult task of saving the world. These are the people who have realised the spirit-essence’.

Now there would be yet a third warning. There is a revealing idiom in German often used to express when something has become clear and conscious. One says: ‘Yes, now a light has dawned on me’ (Ja, jetzt ist mir ein Licht aufgegangen). It is no generalisation to note that where light is spoken of in such a context, we can recognise an indication of the process of becoming conscious. The brightening [Auflichtung] and increasing illumination [Erhellung] of consciousness is indeed the decisive phenomenon of individual and collective human maturation. From a western standpoint, we who have only recently made the leap, about 2,500 years ago, from the dream to the waking consciousness, from the irrational to the mental-rational consciousness, must be doubly mindful that the ‘great experience’ actually manifests itself in an ‘enlightenment’ [Erleuchtung] of consciousness. In other words, a new illumination [Erhellung] and intensification of consciousness should emerge, which this time awakens not from dream into wakefulness, but from wakefulness itself into a waking-beyond-wakefulness [Überwachheit]. This concerns the transfiguring event by virtue of which consciousness is so intensified that it is able to leap beyond the established limits of thinking and thus of rational comprehension, thereby participating in the transparency of the whole. It is the mutation, i.e., the leap from the ‘mental’ to the ‘supra-mental’ (Sri Aurobindo), from the ‘mental’ to the ‘non-mental’ consciousness (D. T. Suzuki), or as we expressed it (independently and prior to knowing the formulations just mentioned): from the ‘mental-rational’ into ‘arational-integral’ consciousness. Once again it is evident here that this contemporary mutation is a worldwide phenomenon.

It would be a mistake to think that the numerous expressions for the ‘great experience’ that have been made known here prove that it is a matter of some irrational vagueness or lack of clarity [Unklares]. The opposite is the case: it is a matter of arational hyperclarity [Überklares] which, since it refers to the whole, cannot be designated or fixed by individual words or concepts, and can only be illuminated by approximate circumlocutions. An example of this method of perception is Graf Dürckheim’s essay, On the Way to Transparency. Describing the phenomenon of transparency as commensurate with the fullness of the whole, he sheds new light upon emergent approaches and points of departure. For it must not be forgotten: transparency means the whole. It is in no way an experience of unity [Einheitserlebnis]. G. R. Heyer speaks quite correctly of this when he says that among those who are ‘wholly great … the opposites should be regarded as overcome, and it is precisely this that should be taken as a sign of the genuinely preeminent human being—one who is grounded in ultimate reality’. This overcoming or supersession [Überwingdung] of opposites is synonymous with liberation from the exclusive validity of the mental-rational consciousness. Only this consciousness knows and establishes opposites. In the ‘ultimate reality’—another circumscription for ‘transparency’, ‘spirit-essence’, ‘primordial ground’, or ‘being’—the opposites are abrogated; they no longer form a duality [Zweiheit]; here, advaita—the ‘nonduality’ [Nicht-Zweiheit] which is not a unity [Einheit]—prevails. (This incidentally shows that the attempt to rationally define phenomena of the supra-mundane [überweltlichen] consciousness, an attempt which must always remain inadequate, becomes clearer through the negative formulation than through a positive conceptual branding. This is also true for our advaita-like formulation of the ‘world without opposites’, which expresses no loss of correlation, but rather the correlation-pervaded copresence in the whole).

Many I have met, above all in India, who spoke of samadhi, had probably been swept away in the rapture of a trance, which they called samadhi. Here they find themselves in a diminished state of consciousness of an irrational nature, which has scarcely anything at all to do with enlightenment [Erleuchtung]. Enlightenment is the illumination [Erhellung] of the waking consciousness and is an experience; enrapturement is an endarkening [Eingedunkeltsein] and is a state [Zustand]. It may be presumed that whenever the state of enrapturement is at play, the affected person regresses (falls back) into the irrational-mythic, or even into the pre-rational, magic structure of consciousness. This can be a profound, vital experience: the successful flight from wakefulness into the shelter of the consciousness-dimming, vegetative, and psychic sphere. Yet the fact is that trance refers to a distanciation from the ego [Ichferne], indeed to the egolessness [Ichlosigkeit] of the enraptured state, whereas enlightenment leads to the overcoming of the ego [Ichüberwindung] and thus to freedom from the ego [Ichfreiheit].

To the extent that western humanity possesses a clear waking consciousness and a non-rigidified ego, sinking back into the ecstatic state of enrapturement may be an aberration. It is at once a betrayal of our spiritual and psychological heritage, as well as a renunciation of our maturity and self-overcoming. Here, instead of overcoming, there is only self-abnegation. It is, furthermore, a form of misunderstood, deficient mysticism. Lama Anagarika Govinda refers to this fact in his account of Tibetan mysticism when he writes that it ‘(has) nothing in common with the “mystical darkness” [stemming] from the dubious, individual visions of impassioned minds. Rather, it is grounded in a spiritual discipline that actively discourages emotional exuberance, nebulous thinking, and untamed fantasy’. The moment of ecstasy, of being outside oneself, once had its proper validity when humanity’s homeland was still in the dream-consciousness. But not all so-called mystics were subordinated to this. Since a rational, pragmatic rigidification has come to predominate in the West, mysticism has been seen as an expression of uncontrollable irrationalities; that it could also be more than this—in particular: more than our own rationality—is an impermissible consideration for the rationalistic hubris of western humanity. But here too there is a rethinking underway. Graf Dürckheim and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, and more recently Shizuteru Ueda, have observed an affinity in attitude between Zen and Meister Eckhart in their aversion to ecstatic enrapturement.

When I was in Kamakura a few years ago, which lies on the Pacific, seventy-five kilometres west of Tokyo, I received a confirmation for what has been said here regarding the character of rapture (Entrückung) and with it also the often trance-bound form of the Indic samadhi. There, in the Tokyo-Temple-District, I visited the Zen-master Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. In the course of our discussions, which had the character of a Chinese or Japanese calligraphic painting—thanks to Suzuki’s words and sentences, which were placed so precisely, suggestively, and economically, like dots and strokes—I had told him of an experience that I had been witness to a few weeks earlier in Sarnath. There had been no rapture to observe, I was not swept away into the irrational, there was no loss of consciousness of the world; rather, there was the overcoming of the mental-rational: there was arational transparency and with it that intensity of consciousness that had integrated both the irrational and the rational in such a manner that both were respectively available, without the possibility of being overwhelmed by them, for their bearers, the vital and the psychic, acquiesce to the spiritual. The Zen-master listened attentively with his head bowed and his eyes almost closed. He then looked up and said with a smile of agreement: ‘Not irrational, but arational; that’s it. This experience that you had, it was not samadhi; it was satori’.

Intentionless work on oneself and the prevention of ecstatic rapture can convert any conjecture about the ‘uncreated light’ into self-evident transparency.

Whatever words we use to describe the irruption of the divinely-spiritual [Göttlich-Geistigen] into the human—it remains the fundamental common ground that can be brought about, in East and West alike, through the same spiritual disposition and attitude. This should [be enough] to have made these remarks evident. Here, as there, participation in the transparency of the spiritual is fulfilled in analogous forms; moreover they are dispensing with the ecstatic elements in increasing measure, which indicates that both in the West and in Asia, there is a strengthening of the new (supramental, non-mental, arational-integral yet always time-free) consciousness.­

Notes on the Translation

The translation presented here is drawn from Jean Gebser’s 1968 work, Asien lächelt anders: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis östlicher Wesenart (‘Asia Smiles Otherwise: A Contribution to the Understanding of the Eastern Way of Being’), chapter 13: Gemeinsamkeiten in der geistigen Haltung (‘Homologies in Spiritual Attitude’ [Between East and West]). For the text we have relied upon Gesamtausgabe, Band VI (1986; 1999), 156–165; and Jean-Gebser-Reihe, Band 3: Von spielenden Gelingen (2018), 232–239. Extracts from an earlier version of this translation were featured in my lecture, ‘Oriental Moons, Western Days: Jean Gebser in Asia’, presented for the 48th International Jean Gebser Society Conference (Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado, October 12–14, 2018).

Aaron Cheak, August 2024

Waking beyond wakefulness
The term Überwachheit is formed from Über (‘beyond’) + Wachheit (‘wakefulness’, ‘waking’). ‘Hyper-wakefulness’, ‘supra-wakefulness’, ‘hypervigilance’, or ‘heightened wakefulness’ provide partly adequate translations, but all fail to express, and sometimes even obscure, the overarching meaning in a Gebserian context. While the prefix ‘hyper-’ is etymologically correct (Greek hyper is cognate with German über and English ‘over’), it unfortunately brings connotations of extremity and suggests ‘extreme wakefulness’, whereas the proper meaning of hyper and über in this context is ‘beyond’, implying a transcendence or supersession of waking consciousness. The prefix ‘supra-’, while technically accurate, assimilates too readily to ‘super’ and fails, like ‘hyper’, to escape the connotations of extremity. Compare Nietzsche’s Übermensch, which is famously not a ‘hyper-’ or ‘super-’ human, but a being that goes beyond humanity. So too for Gebser: Überwachheit is the consciousness that goes beyond wakefulness.

Nonduality
Gebser distinguishes between Nicht-Zweiheit, literally ‘non-twoness’ and Nicht-Dualität, literally ‘non-duality’ and asserts that the former is the correct translation of Sankrit advaita, which is formed from the alpha privativum (the prefix a- indicating ‘negation’ or ‘absence’) and dvaita, ‘dual’ (from dva, ‘two’). Despite Gebser’s insistence that Nich-Dualität is an erroneous translation, ‘nonduality’ remains, at least in English, an acceptable translation of advaita among scholars.

The supramundane
Überweltlich = hyperkosmios (‘hypercosmic’) = supermundanus (‘supramudane’), again with the clarification that the terms über-, hyper-, and supra- all indicate a condition ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ the reality in question, rather than an extreme expression of it. Compare Greek metaphysics, in which the hypercosmic typically indicates the immaterial hypostases beyond the created cosmos, i.e., the realities which pre-exist the visible cosmos, and which bring it into being as a nested reality within its own spheres (whence ‘encosmic’).

 Opposites and objects
The reality of Transparenz is characterised by Gebser as a ‘world without opposites’ (Welt ohne Gegenüber), i.e., as a consciousness of the whole that has transcended the dualistic bifurcation of reality into subjects and objects, which itself stems from the predominance of perspectival ego-consciousness. The supersession of this consciousness is reinforced here by Gebser’s use of the term ungegenständlich, ‘non-objective’, which is formed from the prefix un- with the adjectival form of Gegenstand (‘object’, that which ‘stands against’). The implication is that the ‘object’ in question is in opposition to a ‘subject’. That which is un-gegenständlich, however, transcends the subject-object duality and thus the mental-rational tendency to confine reality to the ‘objective’ in a perspectival sense. Gebser’s entire insistence on the ‘aperspectival’ (cf. Ursprung und Gegenwart, 1949/1953 = The Ever-Present Origin, 1985, passim) is an attempt to express the same ‘absence of’ and ‘freedom from’ perspectival objectivity.

Alchemical catharsis
The process of purification, purgation, and catharsis that Gebser refers to here is expressed in imagery drawn from metallurgical processes. What we have translated as ‘purgation’ (Entschlackung) is literally the ‘deslagging’, or ‘removal of slag’ (Schlack). Läuterung (‘refinement’) ranges in meaning from ‘sublimation’ to ‘catharsis’ but in this context indicates the process of purification (removal of scoria) that results in a refined product. The metallurgical nature of the imagery (‘melted and remoulded’, liberation from the ‘scoria of the soul’) suggests an alchemical dimension to the work of inner purification, which is in fact consistent with the ancient view of alchemy as a catharsis of the psyche. We hasten to add here that this view is not merely a modern, Jungian appropriation, but inheres in the ancient textual strata itself, represented most notably by Zosimos of Panopolis (circa third–fourth century C.E.), who defines alchemy (chēmeia), within an explicitly soteriological context, as both a symbol of cosmogenesis (kosmopoiïa) and as a catharsis (kathairousin) of the divine soul. (On alchemy as cosmogenesis and catharsis, see our contributions to the revised edition of Alchemical Traditions, ed., Cheak, forthcoming, Rubedo Press).

Ontological breakthrough
We have rendered Durchbruch zum Wesen both as ‘ontological breakthrough’ and as ‘breakthrough to the essence of being’, following the basic meanings of Wesen: ‘being, essence, essential nature’.

Real beyond real
Regarding überwirkliche Transparenz (‘supra-real’ or ‘hyperreal transparency’), the same remarks apply regarding über as ‘beyond’ as noted above, hence our choice: ‘transparency that is beyond reality [as we know it]’, which while less concise, avoids confusion with modern philosophical concepts of hyperreality and is more evocative, we feel, than ‘supra-real’, which nevertheless remains a legitimate alternative.

Self-nature
‘Spirit-essence’ (Geistessenz) is presented by Gebser as synonymous with ‘self-nature’ (Selbstnatur), which in Chan literature corresponds to zìxìng (自性) and in Sanskrit to svabhāva (स्वभाव). Cf. also ‘original heart/mind’ (běnxīn, 本心).