Top 8 Quotes by Jean Gebser

In the end, everything is simple.

Simple, Ends

All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this pre-acceptance of the pain and torment, they will be visited upon us in an otherwise necessary individual and universal collapse. Anyone disassociated from his origin and his spiritually sensed task acts against origin. Anyone who acts against it has neither a today nor a tomorrow.

Jean Gebser

Pain, Acceptance, Tasks

Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or the unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness or wakefulness. Through the late twentieth century, the movement of the Left limited themselves to a materialist understanding of reality- exemplified by Marxism- demanding social justice and economic equality but not the restoration of intuition and the recognition of the hidden, qualitative dimensions of being suppressed by the mental-rational consciousness, narrowly focused on the quantifiable.

Jean Gebser

Reality, Justice, Understanding

Integral reality is the world’s transparency, a perceiving of the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of the truth of the world and of man and of all that transluces both.

Jean Gebser

Reality, Men, World

Jean Gebser (1985). “The Ever-Present Origin”

What counts now are the value-less facts, the material and the rational. All else is regarded with condescension as being of only sentimental value.

Jean Gebser

Condescension And, Facts, Sentimental

Jean Gebser (1985). “The Ever-Present Origin”

Only if we grant power to something can it have power over us. It becomes a serving and sustaining potency when we again are able to place it into the realm where it belongs, instead of submitting to it.

Jean Gebser

Able, Potency, Realms

Jean Gebser (1985). “The Ever-Present Origin”

We must recognize that the attempt to set forth the temporal course commonly referred to as the "evolution of mankind" is merely an attempt to structure events for convenient accessibility. Consequently, we must exclude from our discussion as far as possible such misleading notions as "development" and "progress."

Jean Gebser

Progress, Events, Development

Jean Gebser (1985). “The Ever-Present Origin”