Jean Gebser, 'Auf der Suche nach dem neuen Bewusstsein,' Gesamtausgabe 5/2, 55ff. [Trans.

Aaron Cheak] ON SEEKING THE NEW CONSCIOUSNESS No one who seeks, seeks after nothing. Everyone who seeks, seeks that which he secretly already knows, that which he has secretly already found. One seeks a golden treasure, for it gives direction; another seeks wealth, because it drags them out of their inner darkness and into the light. The event by which something lifts itself into the light or is lifted into the light is already an awakening (Bewusstwerden). The one for whom something becomes conscious, to say nothing accidentally, for them a light will have arisen. This light, however, is not that of a candle or a lamp; it isto employ an old but imprecise circumscription, one which has been stamped with the antiquated methods of dualistic-rational thought 'otherworldly light,' which illuminates for the first time a perceptible, spiritual landscape. The Minnesingers, who sought love, which they praised, didn't call themselves 'seekers' at all; they called themselves troubadours , they were trovatori ; they were, as the word indicates, 'Finders': not finders of love, but of the light of love, that light which transfigures and illuminates earthly love. The love thanks to which love is a brilliant reflection of the greater, universal love, the love they served when, in the hour of the rising lightof the aube [dawn], the daybreak and sunrise, the aubade [daybreak]they offered to their chosen woman, without any desire to woo or dominate, their morning song (which for centuries has been so unpleasantly described that it has effectively been misunderstood as a 'daybreak serenade'). The troubadours of today seek the inner light that the Athos monks called 'uncreated,' that light of lights which not only transfigures and illuminates the earthly, but also allows it to be nourished, to become transparenta transparency that shines through everything here and renders everything perceptible until there are no opposites; for it shines equally through the darkness of night, which is never entire, as well as the brightness of day, which is also never entire. Arguably only a few of the Athos monks have found that light. By believing to have found itso a friend of mine reports who once spent half a year living under themthey overcame the hellish doubt that it might have been merely imagined light (eingebildetes Licht); here decades of asceticism, of deliberate, intentional effort, self-hypnotically duplicates (vorgaukeln) for them the object of their aim. They remain, however, in the corrosive incertitude (zerstrenden Ungewissheit); at best they give themselves new hope, and thus a

lingering illness of the soul, because hope is a disease. Generally, the time and the possibilities of the former consciousness structure were not yet ready for the perception of transparency. Only a few would be apportioned this cathartic truth-perception. Today, because time and consciousness are ready for it, for those who know how to open themselves, the transparency of the light 'on the other side' would only mislead them for it still leads largely down the way of intent; for striving to obtain it by any means is to lose thereby that which in secret is already found. These losers (of the object sought)to whom the majority of those who seek drugs belongmust be wary of the sentimental and heroic caricature of the 'eternal seeker.' The light of the new consciousness is not reached by any way, intent, or means. Todayand this too is an expression of the new consciousnesswe need the activity that for the seeker precedes the finding, no longer formulated paradoxically, as Blaise Pascal must do, with his encouraging words, which, however, pertain to doubt and thus to the split condition of the thought-forms and consciousness-structure of his aeon: Console-toi, tu ne me chercherais pas, si tu ne m'avais trouv (console yourself, you would never have sought me if you had not found me). For us, finding and seeking are by no means exchangeable results of a sequence, but the simultaneous event of awakening (Bewusstwerdung). The one is neither a means nor a way to the other, as the transforming lacks of causal thought would here intend, and which Pascal already strove to overcome through his paradox.