He was a cousin of World War I-era chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.

Even late in life, Gebser travelled widely in India, the Far East, and the Americas, and wrote half a dozen more books.

His thesis of the failure of one structure of consciousness alongside the emergence of a new one led him to inquire as to whether such had not occurred before.

[7] Working from the historical evidence of almost every major field, (e.g., poetry, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, religion, physics and the other natural sciences, etc.)

Gebser saw traces of the emergence (which he called "efficiency") and collapse ("deficiency") of various structures of consciousness throughout history.

Gebser symbolizes it with the "triangle", which illustrates a "trinity" of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: "the base of the triangle with its two points lying in opposition represents the dual contraries or antinomies which are unified at the point or apex.

"[15] For Gebser, this is the essence of "the emergence of directed or discursive thought"[16] with which Western science would be built.

"It required centuries to sufficiently devitalize and demythologize the word so that it was able to express distinct concepts freed from the wealth of imagery, as well as to reach the rationalistic extreme where the word, once a power [magic] and later an image [myth], was degraded to a mere formula.

Mechanized slaughter of two world wars and the new atomic weapons exemplified and symbolized the expression of the ontology of the rational/mental structure.

But it was through this very quagmire of "the decline of the West" that Gebser saw the emergence of a new structure of consciousness which he termed the integral.

What integral awareness notices is that though we may utilize categorical thinking for various purposes, we also have the realization that time is an indivisible whole.

Without the awareness of the whole, one would be stuck in a kind of "not-knowing" of an always only "now" not connected to any sense of past or future.

That to live "objectively" means to give life to the horrors of nihilism combined with the know how of highly "efficient" weapons.

Gebser traces the evidence for the transformations of the structure of consciousness as they are concretized in historical artifacts.

He sought to avoid calling this process "evolutionary", since any such notion was illusory when applied to the "unfolding of consciousness."

Gebser emphasized that biological evolution is an enclosing process which particularizes a species to a limited environment.

Any attempt to give a direction or goal to the unfolding of awareness is illusory in that it is based upon a limited, mentalistic, linear notion of time.

Gebser wrote that the question as to the fate of humanity is still open, that for it to become closed would be the ultimate tragedy, but that such a closure remains a possibility.

Ken Wilber referred to and quoted Gebser (along with many other theorists) in his 1981 Up from Eden and subsequent works.

[19] Thompson applied these insights to education theory in his 2001 Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution.

In his 2004 Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness, and in collaboration with the mathematician Ralph Abraham, Thompson further related Gebser's structures to periods in the development of mathematics (arithmetic, geometric, algebraic, dynamical, chaotic) and in the history of music.

Gebser's integral philosophy is evaluated and applied to New Age thinking about a nascent shift in consciousness in the 2006 book 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck.

In A Secret History of Consciousness (2003) cultural historian Gary Lachman links Gebser's work to that of other alternative philosophers of consciousness, such as Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner, Colin Wilson, and Jurij Moskvitin.