Meanwhile, in offshore strongholds and Monaco penthouses, currency traders shift dollars back and forth into yen and deutsche marks, making money only from “the difference that makes a difference” in seconds of time. These traders are beyond the control of any president, and so the fluctuations of dollars and pesos are as unstable and chaotic as the weather. As the industrial marketplace expands to planetary dimensions, and as the time of a transaction contracts to microseconds, a singularity is created in which the global marketplace, like a black hole sucking up a star, devours entire nation-states. As the currents of the biosphere interact with the currencies of the world economy, we get not an international politique, but a Gaia Politique in which an enantiomorphic polity emerges. Enantiomorphic means the shape of opposites, so this polity is like the atmosphere that emerges in the opposing but coupled systems of the ocean and the continent. The result is a shifting, chaotic, complex dynamical system that we call the weather. Climate may be predictable, but the weather is not. The state of the weather is much more than a territorial state of land: as a chaotic system, it is more of an archetypal image of our contemporary condition than the fixed earth of farmland and pastoral landscape. No longer is it a question of identity through Blut und Boden, the blood and soil of the Fascist’s patriotic state, it has become the archetypal image of light and air.

The disintegration of the body is, therefore, one signal that evolution is no longer taking place at the level of the single organism. Evolution is now multiorganismic just as once it was multicellular. Once the cell enclosed molecules, then organisms enclosed cells, and now something else is enclosing us in distributive lattices of light. Christian mystics would call it the mystical body of Christ, Buddhists would call it the jeweled net of Indra, and fundamentalists would call it Satanic possession. Clearly, some new kind of religious knowledge and discrimination is called for, one not easily gained in our materialistic, technologically focused society.

Nothing less than truth, goodness, and a Buddhist universal compassion are going to get us through this transition from industrialization to planetization. Our level of consciousness has now become the biggest obstruction to the continuity of human existence. We have made normalcy nonviable, so we have opted for an "up or out" scenario in cultural evolution. We either shift upward to a new culture of a higher spirituality to turn our electronic technologies into cathedrals of light, or we slide downward to darkness and entropy in a war of each against all.

There is another genius who wrote on the evolution of consciousness who can be of use here to help us understand our contemporary predicament as a choice between evolution and dissolution: the German turned Swiss cultural historian Jean Gebser. A refugee from Franco’s Spain and Hitler's Germany, Gebser was a brilliantly intuitive intellectual mystic with a profound understanding of poetry and art. Right in the middle of the rise of Fascism in the 1930s and the descent of Europe into the Second World War, he had an intellectual vision of the evolution of consciousness that anticipated and excelled the whole New Age and the new paradigm thinking of the 1970s. Gebser was a friend of Frederico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Picasso, and his understanding of culture is based upon a deep feeling for specific works of poetry and art. But his high cultural European approach to the evolution of consciousness makes it difficult for Americans to appreciate his work. We have so replaced culture with psychology, psychotherapy, and simplistic workshops on how to fix the depressive flats of our lives that we prefer the compulsive mappings and textbook categorizations of Ken Wilber to the poetic insights of Jean Gebser. Wilber seeks to control the universe through mapping, and the dominant masculinist purpose of his abstract system is to shift power from the described to the describer. As an autodidact from the Midwest, Wilber wants to promote himself as “the Einstein of the consciousness movement” and so he is announcing a trilogy of thousand-page tomes that will explain everything once and for all. This form of scholarship is really a mode of psychic inflation and self-magnification; it is a grand pyramid of systems of abstract thought, piled on other systems of abstract thought, with Wilber’s kept for the top. Never does one come upon a feeling for the concrete, a new look at an individual poem, a painting, or a work of architecture. Gebser, in contrast to Wilber, is the genuine article, a grand European thinker with a grand vision, but one who comes upon his general insights through a loving attention for particulars: through an understanding of the role of adjectives in the poetry of Rilke, the resurgence of a prehistoric matriarchy in the surrealistic line drawings of Garcia Lorca, the meaning of an ancient Chinese mask that has no mouth, or the social significance of the lack of perspective in the paintings of Picasso.

We have so replaced culture with psychology, psychotherapy, and simplistic workshops on how to fix the depressive flats of our lives that we prefer the compulsive mappings and textbook categorizations of Ken Wilber to the poetic insights of Jean Gebser.

Wilber seeks to control the universe through mapping, and the dominant masculinist purpose of his abstract system is to shift power from the described to the describer. As an autodidact from the Midwest, Wilber wants to promote himself as “the Einstein of the consciousness movement” and so he is announcing a trilogy of thousand-page tomes that will explain everything once and for all.® This form of scholarship is really a mode of psychic inflation and self-magnification; it is a grand pyramid of systems of abstract thought, piled on other systems of abstract thought, with Wilber’s kept for the top. Never does one come upon a feeling for the concrete, a new look at an individual poem, a painting, or a work of architecture.

It was a Sisyphean labor to get my San Francisco students [assume notes/Center for Integral Studies?] to read Gebser, for they all preferred the undergraduate textbook generalizations of Wilber, but characteristically the members of my New York Lindisfarne Symposium loved Gebser’s masterwork and felt that his Ever-Present Origin’ was the kind of book that changed one’s life. Precisely because Gebser’s rich high European culture takes for granted not just a knowledge of poetry and painting but an instant recall of famous poems and canvases, New Yorkers, who live in a museum-rich culture, can recall the pictures and understand the argument. The “New Edge” Californians think that a color-degraded image of a Monet on CD-ROM or the World Wide Web is better than the real thing.