abstract: - The human world is undergoing a major transformation. Struggling to emerge is a needed liberation from the current dominant worldview of the West. Having become deficient and destructive, this dominant worldview is founded on principles of separation, atomism, reductionism, and simplification. Starting from this context, this thesis explores the evolution of consciousness, focusing on the individual/collective relationship. Pivotal here is developmental psychologist Robert Kegan's subject-object theory and his description of a "post-formal" mode of cognition, of making meaning according to a constructive "postmodern" sensibility. Jean Gebser's brilliant, erudite explication and review of the evolution of human consciousness, and his insight into an emerging "Integral" consciousness, is just as central. Edgar Morin's explication of the notion of a paradigm of simplification and the subsequent need for a paradigm of complexity rounds out the core of the thesis. This discourse, based on the works of Kegan, Gebser, and Morin elucidates that there is emerging a novel mode of making sense of the world in non-simplified terms, based on what I will be referring to as complex TPM -- thinking - perceiving - meaning - making. This process of making sense of the world, of coming to know what is Self and what is "other" in integral/complex terms, is becoming increasingly necessary as we continue our evolution towards a planetary culture. It is my belief that if we do not change, the hubris of the current dominant structure of consciousness will certainly overtake us, and the biosphere too, as it becomes increasingly deficient.

keywords: consciousness, evolution, complexity, integral, Robert Kegan, Jean Gebser, Edgar Morin, Ken Wilber, thinking, perceiving, meaning, epistemology, developmental psychology, postmodernism, modernism, paradigm, planetary culture.