From Ego to Wego

Could a new approach to social networks and media accelerate positive transformation and conscious evolution?

Last essay, I proposed the theory that humanity is in an evolutionary process or initiatory crucible to attain a new level of consciousness and condition of being, over some unknown span of time. Just as we once developed language and then writing, and just as we once shifted from group or tribal consciousness to individuated self-awareness, there could be another “mutation” of consciousness approaching us. Such a mutation could only happen during a totalizing, life-or-death crisis for our species, in the same way that earlier micro-organisms learned to form more complex structures when faced with an overwhelming existential threat.

The consciousness structures, according to Jean Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin. We have passed through four previous structures — the Archaic, Magic, Mythical, and Mental-Rational — and we are now on the verge of transitioning to the Integral-Aperspectival. Each structure of consciousness is characterized by a different relationship to time and space, which creates different potentialities. Each ends with a crisis forcing a mutation of awareness.

I suggested that this new stage of collective unfolding would be a “graduation” or overcoming of our current alienated ego-based state, yet it must also occur without giving up the benefits of the individuation process we have undergone over the last several thousand years. I find the concept of “ego freedom” from Jean Gebser (rather than “ego loss” as in the absorption of the masses in Fascist or Fundamentalist movements) a helpful term to define this.¹

Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin offers the most profound interpretation of this movement between different “consciousness structures” that I have found. His ideas were the basis for Spiral Dynamics, popularized by Ken Wilber. I recommend going back to the original source if you can. Here is the Spiral Dynamics version:

Spiral Dynamics model, including Wilber’s famous Four Quadrants

It seems pretty clear that this evolution also impels us toward a unification of humanity in one way or another, unlikely as it seems at this point. In Archetype of the Apocalypse, Jungian theorist Edward Edinger proposes we are in the historical period where the Apocalypse archetype descends from the collective unconscious to take literal form. Like Jung, he sees the Apocalypse (the word literally means “uncovering” or “revealing) as primarily a psychological event — the integration of the repressed elements in the unconscious — but one with huge implications for our all-too-human world:

The “coming of the Self” is imminent; and the process of collective “individuation” is living itself out in human history. One way or another, the world is going to be made a single whole entity. But it will be unified either in mutual mass destruction or by means of mutual human consciousness. If a sufficient number of individuals can have the experience of the coming of the Self as an individual, inner experience, we may just possibly be spared the worst features of its external manifestation.

In fact, from where we are now, we can envision a few different ways in which the world can be unified: Through mass destruction, but also through technocratic totalitarianism, where the vast mass of people are implanted with chips, under constant surveillance, etc. We seem to be veering perilously close to dystopic outcomes — a technological control society — that some might find worse than extinction. The other option is a mutational shift into mutualism.