In The Ever-Present Origin, a work of vast erudition, Swiss cultural philosopher Jean Gebser dedicates a number of pages to describe the most archaic form of consciousness of our species as a kind of perception as undivided as indivisible which would hardly produce a reality that could be conceived as outer and separate from the human. Gebser describes this type of consciousness as

akin, if not identical, to the original state of biblical paradise: a time where the soul is yet dormant, and therefore a dreamless time, a complete non-differentiation of man and universe.¹

Gebser continues his characterization of archaic consciousness with a quote from Chinese sage Chuang-Tzu: “dreamlessly the true men of earlier times slept,”² which would point to the absence of an active unconscious during sleep, that is, to a completely natural and, therefore paradisiacal, way of life that does not cause any repression. A locus amoenus of both mind and world.

In favor of his thesis Gebser quotes an early Chinese chromatic symbolism according to which “at that time blue and green are not yet differentiated. The common word Ch’ing is used for the color of the sky as well as of the sprouting plant.”³ This circumstance, verified on many occasions by anthropology, would mean that two of the most important poles of human experience, heaven and earth, were not yet perceived as such. According to Aristotle, the later division of this continuum into a superior and an inferior pole would have brought forth a first intimation of consciousness, since “the soul is later, and coeval with the heaven.”⁴ In other words, only when aware of the movements of the heavens does the human gain a measure of consciousness, however small, of his own being.

According to Owen Barfield, another great scholar of the evolution of consciousness, the continuity between human and world—evident in the harmonious relationship of our species to the natural world until relatively recently—implies a form of consciousness “which cannot perceive the material merely as such; which in perceiving its environment, perceives at the same time an immaterial within or through, expressed by it… it is the kind of consciousness for which there is no such thing as an ‘outer’ world. The outer and material is always, and of its own accord, the expression or representation of an inward and immaterial.”⁵ Thus, the archaic world that was neither material nor immaterial but a continuum; the original seat of human consciousness was not a place, it was a threshold where there was no notion of a “self” or an “other.”

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1. Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, 43. I complement the authorized English translation by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas with the phrase “and therefore a dreamless time,” that appears in both the Spanish translation and the German original. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 44. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Aristotle, Metaphysics. Book XII, VI. ↩︎
5. Owen Barfield, History, Guilt and Habit, 31. ↩︎