Integral Science: how evolving consciousness changes our view of water, life, and climate

Jean Gebser was a Swiss philosopher and linguist who developed a theory about the stages of consciousness that humans have evolved through over time. Corresponding to these stages, he also laid out stages that societies move through. In his model, we evolve from the archaic, to the magical, to the mythical, to the mental, and then toward the integral stage.

What’s intriguing about this theory is that it suggests different fields of knowledge—physics, biology, climate science, economics, sociology—evolve in similar ways, shaped by the structure of consciousness we’re collectively operating from.

Clare Graves, a psychologist, later developed a theory of stages of human and societal development as well. He called it Spiral Dynamics. Ken Wilber then integrated Spiral Dynamics with Jean Gebser’s model into an even broader framework called Integral Theory.

All of these theories share a core idea: that as human consciousness evolves, so does the way we understand the world—including our sciences and systems of knowledge.

The mental stage is marked by rationalism, materialism, reductionism, and a linear, mechanistic view of cause and effect. The integral stage, by contrast, is more holistic. It’s grounded in systems thinking, in looking at interdependencies, feedback loops, adaptation, self-organization, and self-regulation.

Fritjof Capra, in The Turning Point, writes about this kind of shift in science. “The mechanistic view of the world,” he says, “was developed in the seventeenth century by Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others. Descartes based his view of nature on a fundamental division into two separate and independent realms: that of mind and that of matter. The material universe was seen as a machine and nothing but a machine.” This mechanistic world view is part of Gebser’s mental stage. But this is now shifting. Capra notes: “The emerging worldview of modern physics is inherently holistic and ecological.” This is the integral stage.

Physics moved from studying systems in equilibrium, with linear causality—where small inputs cause small outputs, representative of the mental stage—to nonlinear systems with feedback, where small perturbations can cascade into large-scale changes, representative of the integral stage. Complex systems theory began to look at how mutual feedback between components could create new, stable patterns of behavior. It studied nonequilibrium dynamics, emergence, and the behavior of complex adaptive systems—where individual and collective behavior mutates and self-organizes in response to small initiating events.

In biology, too, there was a shift—from seeing the body as a collection of separate parts to seeing it as an interconnected system. Medicine long operated in silos: you had an eye doctor, a liver specialist, a heart specialist, an immunologist, a foot doctor—each treating their part of the body without a deeper understanding of how all those parts interact. Capra wrote that “the doctor’s role is to intervene, either physically or chemically, to correct the malfunctioning of a specific mechanism, different parts of the body being treated by different specialists.” Medicines were often prescribed to fix one organ while unintentionally disrupting another. This is the mental stage of biology.

But then the view widened. The microbiome—the bacterial ecosystem living in and on our bodies—came to be recognized as a fundamental part of human functioning. There is a constant feedback loop between the microbiome and our bodily systems, shaping behavior, health, even mood. The microbiome is a complex adaptive system. We now treat the bacterial ecosystem itself—guiding its balance to address disease. It’s the feedback between bacteria and human cells that matters. We’ve expanded the definition of “human” to include the DNA and function of non-human species. This leads to the concept of the holobiont: an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, forming a single ecological unit through symbiosis.

In the 1990s, systems biology emerged—a new way of looking at how the whole system works together. It brought interdisciplinary approaches to understanding how cells, DNA, proteins, and organs interact. The body is increasingly seen as an ecosystem. We are entering into the integral stage of biology.

Climate science already started out studying complex systems, with emergent behaviors like convection, thunderstoms, Hadley cells and jet streams coming out of underlying physics of the atmosphere. But the understanding is evolving to even deeper understanding of its complexity, climate is in a feedback loop with the land: it's no longer just a one-way street where climate shapes ecology—we now see how ecology shapes climate. It’s not just rainfall affecting vegetation; it’s also vegetation influencing rainfall. The relationship is co-evolutionary.

There is the idea of co-adaptation emerging—where, as the Biotic Regulation theory of Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva and Gaia Theory of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis suggest, life adapts the climate in ways that support life itself. Biodiversity doesn't just survive in a given climate—it helps shape and regulate that climate. There are self-regulatory processes that ecosystems perform in coordination with the atmosphere. This is an integral-type theory of earth science and climate science.

Water, too, has long been understood through the lens of the water cycle—just cycling through different states. But we can also begin to understand it as an adaptive, self-organizing, and self-regulating system. It’s part of a geophysiological whole. Evapotranspiration, hydraulic redistribution, stream flow—these aren't just passive responses to weather. They are active, guided flows, shaped by life. Just as blood flow is influenced by the cells it serves, the movement of water across the land is shaped by ecosystems. Plants and microbes influence where water goes, and how it moves, for their own benefit. Life adapts the water cycle. This is the view proposed by renowned hydrologist Hubert Savenije. This is the integral stage of the understanding of water.

Jean Gebser’s core insight was that as our consciousness develops, we become more capable of perceiving and working with complexity—both within ourselves and in the world around us. As our awareness rises, we gain the ability to understand the Earth as a living, self-regulating system—with feedback loops, metastable states, and intricate interdependencies. We also begin to develop the tools to model and engage with this complex dance of life, water, and climate more wisely.

As consciousness evolves, so too will our social and political structures. We’ll learn how to integrate the scale of bioregional community management with other socio-political scales, in a large scale land and climate restoration movement. We are still at a mental stage of human society, but we are starting to get glimpses of an integral socio-econo-politcal system. We’ll begin to interweave economics and ecology—not in a way where ecology is just a resource for economics, but where economics serves the restoration of ecology e.g. people will make a living restoring the Earth—and bringing back the rain. Instead of being as dependent on our human-made dams and aqueducts to get water to our societies, we will have a new and ancient path to getting water, based in working with the natural rhythms of the earth and its hydrological cycle, based in restoring rivers, aquifers and rain. As we understand the nature of the complex system that is the earth and climate, humans will tune its rhythms once again to these complex flows, so we work together with Gaia in a more integral, co-evolutionary, and holistic way.

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