2010/21

Gary Lachman: A Secret History of Consciousness (276p.)

When in 1336 the Italian poet Petrarch climbed the Mont Ventoux, just because he had always wanted to and for aesthetic reasons only (a motive completely unimaginable to his Medieval contemporaries), it marked the end of the ascent of mankind’s mental-rational consciousness (which had begun with Greek philosophy), and it marked the beginning of the descent of mankind’s mental-rational consciousness, the beginning of more than 500 years of decline, the decline of Western civilization into decadence, leaving all of the major knowledge domains (science, religion, philosophy…) in states of postmodern confusion. Perspective was brought into the world, a man standing on a mountaintop surveying the landscape, the dreaded split between object and subject, the dawn of scientific materialism.

Prior to mental-rational consciousness, mankind had already lived through three different and distinct structures of consciousness (the archaic, the magic, the mythic), spanning the let’s say 3-6 millions years in between the first hominids and the Greeks. Mankind is now on the brink of developing a fifth consciousness structure, the integral or ‘aperspectival’ consciousness, which will be characterized by a summation of the four previous states, supplemented by a radically different concept of time.

This is the narrative Gary Lachman brilliantly develops in A Secret History of Consciousness, drawing heavily from the work of behemoths like Steiner, Ouspensky, and last but not least, Jean Gebser.

Either consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, which is the majority view today (scientific materialism), or it’s the other way around. Make your choice. Lachman’s A Secret History of Consciousness is the best exposition of the minority view I have ever had the privilege of reading.

Besides being an eminent cultural historian, Gary Lachman is also a musician, having been one of the founders and the bass player for the New Wave band Blondie.

Magnificent!