"A marvelously exhilarating gallop through every important modern theory of consciousness, from Steiner to Maslow, from Bucke's 'cosmic consciousness' to Gebser's 'integral consciousness.'"
Gary Lachman, whom many readers of The Quest will recognize as a contributor to this magazine, is at once a highly successful popular musician, a much-published writer, and a serious student of psychology and philosophy. It is in the last capacity that he has produced this ambitious and wide-ranging work. A Secret History of Consciousness is both a history of consciousness and a history of ideas about the history of consciousness.
The history of consciousness takes us back to the Paleolithic emergence of a distinctive human mode of awareness. The history of the history of consciousness presented here offers an admirable mix of philosophers usually considered mainstream, including Kant, Hegel, James, and Bergson, together with others, such as Steiner, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and Blavatsky, often put into a special "esoteric" category. Lachman's way of enabling representatives of the two sets to dialogue with each other is one of the great strengths of this work; we do not understand consciousness so well that we can afford to neglect any significant perspective on it.
Theosophists will be particularly happy to see that this study is highly appreciative of Helena Blavatsky's importance in that conversation, presenting her work as the first major post-Darwinian response to nineteenth-century scientific materialism. Her picture, often mythopoeic, of convergent physical and spiritual or "consciousness" evolution, showed how the sterile impasse of religious and scientific dogmatism could be transcended through reference to ancient wisdom in which mind and matter coexist and evolve together.
It is Jean Gebser (1905-1973), however, who is the culminating figure in this book and clearly the scholar with whom Lachman feels the deepest affinity. In Gebser's view of the history of consciousness, archaic magical and mythical ways of thinking "mutated" into "mental-rational" structure and are finally are reaching an "integral" stage. We are now transiting into integralism, in which all previous modes of consciousness are all brought together more perfectly than before. Amid the tension of change, however, there is always the danger of "atavistic" relapse into modes of consciousness whose time is past, which is what Gebser saw happen around him, as perverted forms of magic and myth returned in Europe in the form of fascism and other antirational ideologies. In passing, it may be noted that Gebser was highly regarded by Theosophical intellectuals such as Fritz Kunz well before he became the widely recognized thinker he now is.
A Secret History of Consciousness is highly recommended to all serious readers of philosophy and intellectual history.
--Robert Ellwood, vice president of the Theosophical Society in America and Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California (for Quest Magazine)
"Opens up vast vistas of possibility, suggesting that what we experience as the earth may, in itself, be inseparable from our state of mind, and that the evolution of human consciousness may be as fundamental a process as our development through genetics. A must-read for those seeking an escape from our contemporary culture's cul-de-sac."--Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head
"Thinking outside the box, Lachman challenges many contemporary theories by reinserting a sense of the spiritual back into the discussion. Profoundly erudite, yet easy to read, this book is a provocative mind-stretcher."--Leonard Shlain author of Art & Physics, Alphabet versus the Goddess, and Sex, Time & Power
