Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness [Paperback]

William Irwin Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 1998

In his best-selling The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, William Irwin Thompson intrigued readers with his thoughts on mythology and sexuality. In his newest book, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, he takes the reader on a journey through the evolution of consciousness from the preverbal communications of early stone carvings, to the writings of Marcel Proust, around the monumental wrappings of Christo and up to the rebirth of interest in the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu. Owing as much to the rhythmic constructions of jazz as to established methods of scholarship, Thompson plays a riff on biology and culture seeing the birth of the mind in Proust’s Madeleine, the displacement of humanity in Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag and, in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, the path forward to a new planetary culture. In Coming Into Being, William Irwin Thompson presents a fascinating vision of our past, our present, and our future that no one will want to miss.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In these wide-ranging, deep essays, cultural critic and philosopher Thompson (At the Edge of History) continues his investigation of what he perceives to be an emerging planetary culture. An unorthodox, adventurous thinker, he applies Buddhist concepts to map the evolution of life from bacteria to humans, skips from prehistoric Mother Goddess sculptures to Christo's outdoor environmental wrappings, jumps from Proust to the Bible. He wrestles with the emergence of consciousness, the advent of patriarchy and the postindustrial breakdown of literate middle-class culture. For Thompson, anthropological bestsellers like Richard Leakey's Origins and Donald Johanson's Lucy are myth-laden projections by "the men's club of anthropology" onto the African savanna, while the story of Mary and Jesus, deeply embedded in Near Eastern mythology of the dying male, is a retelling of the ancient Egyptian legend of Isis and Osiris. In Taoist sage Lao Tzu's classic Tao Te Ching, with its celebration of anarchic decentralization and the feminine principle, Thompson finds "the road not taken," an alternative to our world of hierarchy and rigid polarities.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Thompson, a poet, essayist, historian, philosopher, and prolific author (Imaginary Landscape, St. Martin's, 1990) who has taught at Cornell, MIT, and other universities, integrates a synthesis of science, the arts, and his New Age faith and philosophy into a prediction of "planetary culture." Thompson maintains that scientific narrative is structured like folklore and a performance of myth, as illustrated by the theories on hominid evolution and their lack of "factual truth" in hominization. He sees contemporary society as a dark age leading to the establishment of the last of "five evolutionary stages or quantum jumps." The narrative is witty at times, especially when Thompson is discussing Zecharia Sitchin, the 12th planet, and Van Daniken's "pot-boiler" space alien theories. Familiarity with basic New Age jargon and concepts is assumed. Those who can move in such philosophical and spiritualizing thought, whether or not they agree, will find his work compelling.?Eugene O. Bowser, Univ. of Northern Colorado, Greeley
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 284 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (June 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312176929
• ISBN-13: 978-0312176921
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #533,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Thompson was born in Chicago in 1938, but moved to Southern California in 1945, where he grew up to graduate from Los Angeles High School in 1957 and Pomona College in 1962. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship to do his doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He received his doctorate from Cornell in 1966 and published his first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 in 1967. In 1972, his second book At the Edge of History was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 1986 he won the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award for his novel, Islands Out of Time.

Thompson has taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. His interdisciplinary interests are indicated in that he studied anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and cultural history at Cornell. He has served as visiting professor of religion at Syracuse University (1973), visiting professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto (1984), visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in the autumn of each year from 1992 to 1996. In 1995 he designed an evolution of consciousness curriculum for the Ross School in East Hampton, New York and serves as a Founding Mentor, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ross_School). Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association in 1972 and served as its Director until 1997. He has now retired from Lindisfarne and teaching and lives in Maine and devotes himself to writing essays and poetry; he often contributes to the Wild River Review. (http://www.wildriverreview.com/) and the Seven Pillars Review.(http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't say you were not warned, December 6, 1999

By A Customer

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This review is from: Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (Paperback)

Thompson is very perceptive in his understanding of the state of the world today.He rightly sees modern patriarchical/scientific/materialistic society as being on the brink of chaos, and eventual collapse.This book is chock full of insightful comments.Some examples are: "New Age women may run with the wolves, but the New age men bleat with the lambs." "The political cleansing in the universities leads to a Balkanization of the spirit." "The cultural project of the 1990s is one of anger and revenge." "We are going to experience the meltdown of the individualistic man of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment into collectives of noise."Thompson fires out ideas like sparks flying off a Catherine wheel.But I wish he would slow down a bit and go more deeply into his significant ideas.Overall, this book has many challenging ideas about the state of society today.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Thompson Mind-Jazz, January 25, 2002

By A Customer

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This review is from: Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (Paperback)

Reading this book is a bit like watching a Baz Lurhrmann film like "Moulin Rouge" or "William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet." Although the text, superficially, is the printed record of a 1992-1994 lecture series, the lectures themselves were not designed as a linear narrative exposition, but in Thompson's words, operated as a form of mind-jazz -- an improvisational riff on ancient texts.

The texts function in the book very much the way an archetypal storyline does in Luhrmann's films -- as a structural anchor for a great whirl of pop references and images that have no temporal relationship to one another but are perceived to occupy the same ideational space. When this strategy works, the results are exhilarating.

Thompson's focus is the living interaction of consciousness and communicative form -- the way in which a consensual instrument of communication serves as the performance of tacit assumptions about what it means to be human. Influenced in this enterprise by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Thompson demonstrates in diverse communicative fields -- art, literature, religion, myth, history, archaeology, poetry, pop imagery -- how new possibilities for meaning take hold in a culture, relegating displaced forms to folk art, and setting in motion fundamentalist movements in which the frankly archaic returns nativistically, a vocabulary wielded by those disenfranchised by the process of ideational change.

Thompson has been taken to task, in this respect, for the so-called Whig fallacy of history -- that is, for treating past social orders as though they'd been groping along, step by step, to reach our own point of conscious development. But these reviewers are equally irritated by Thompson's multidimensional approach to his subject, regarding it as a rejection of western narrative convention.

It seems to me that the book's structure is more profitably understood as a deliberate reflection of the thesis that Thompson is advancing: that all variants of a conscious perspective exist at once as performances of that perspective, whether or not they served to reflect or influence the society in which they found expression. This thematic consistency both unifies the material and allows for expansive variation, much as an ostinato binds a musical composition while allowing for constantly changing contrapuntal parts.

Although some of his ideas are certainly familiar from post-modern theory, Thompson rejects the nihilism and political utilitarianism that so often attend a deconstructionist perspective on great literature. He appeals, rather, to the reader's imagination, that intermediate psychological ground between matter and spirit, where language serves as a form of currency: a means of exchange between the sensorium and dimensions that lie beyond its direct perceptual acquisition.

This felicitous analogy allows Thompson to introduce the evidence of texts that are not usually understood to have relevance in a technologically oriented society. Like a marriage contract, whose value is not in its material existence as a piece of paper, some texts operate as a "consensual instrument," allowing, as Thompson puts it, a domain of meaning to come into play.

Like Thompson's other books, this one is not an easy read. It's in the business of limning texts as performances of the worldview in which they were generated, determined not only by culture but by gender and adaptive context. And it attempts, by its very form, to invoke as well as to describe what Thompson calls a hermeneutic of the imagination.

Understanding our current state of cultural organization as a bifurcation point, a time in which the traditional forms of literate civilization are undergoing an electronic meltdown, Thompson regards the present communicative medium as the concrete performance of a state of consciousness that is collective rather than individual. Our consensual vocabulary for understanding this evolution, however, is unremittingly technological, which has paved the way for immense corporate interests to define the emerging global landscape. Spirituality, accordingly, is devolving into archaic personal cosmologies.

"Coming into Being" is an attempt to jump, feet first, into that perceived breach between science and mysticism, between abstract scholarship and embodied folk wisdom, between self and Other, between being and Being, in order to celebrate the many textual images, both ancient and contemporary, of their potential integration. I loved this book -- even its recapitulation of "The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light" as though it were a text like any other, important for its ideas and images and not because Thompson happened to write it.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Recapitulation of old Thompson ideas, April 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (Paperback)

I read The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light and fell in love with it. As soon as I put it down, I went off in search of more of Thompson's material. Unfortunately, the next book I picked up was Coming into Being -- a nearly identical, if slightly more incoherent and self-important rendering of the same material, with only a few tidbits added. I might have loved it if I hadn't read TTFBTTL first, but the other book is by far the superior text.