Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

See my review of the hardback with 284 pages and twelve essays compared with 336 pages and fifteen essays. Hint: the last three essays bring Thompson's thoughts to a higher and more mature plane. Hence the hardback should merit four stars and the paperback rates five stars with me. Buy it! Gordon E. Beck, Ph. D., Emeritus Professor, The Evergreen State College, Olympia.

At a time when the question, "Who are America's intellectuals?" was circulating, and the mention of Susan Sontag in this regard left me queasy, I remembered my exhilaration reading Thompson's books in the 70's and 80's and wondered what he was doing lately. I didn't finish this book--some of the "texts" weren't of that much personal interest--but the first three-fourths were wonderful. The introductory essay, which was prophetic in its emphasis on the terrorist-fundamentalist forces at work in the world--is alone worth the price of admission. A brilliant, incisive mind with an insatiable curiosity to expand its range, and we are the beneficiaries.

With Thompson in the lists, I think we Americans can hold our own with intellectuals the world over.

William Irwin Thompson is an important contemporary critic and poet. His work is clearly influenced by an eclectic group of historically important 20th century and contemporary theorists, including: the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa, the process theory of Alfred North Whitehead, the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield, the archytypal psychology of C.G. Jung, the cultural phenomenology of Jean Gebser, the still-avant garde novels of James Joyce, the proto-cybernetic theories of Gregory Bateson, the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, the Gaia theory of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, and the autopoetic theory of Francisco Varela. In turn, Thompson has influenced writers such as mathematician Ralph Abraham, psychedelic theorist David Pinchbeck, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, cinematic theorist John David Ebert, as well as Thompson's son, the philosopher of mind Evan Thompson. He is the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, a collaborative discussion environment for literary figures, scientists, religious figures, and philosophers. Rather than abstractly speculating how it might be possible for different spheres of human activity to fruitfully interact, Thompson has been actively moderating this interaction throughout his entire career. Coming Into Being, is Thompson's inimitable take on various classic world literary and religious texts. Through metaphors, digressions, and uncanny comparisons, Thompson uses the literary, religious, and artistic history of the world to tell a story with deep truth and revelatory power.

This is Thompson's last great book, a conscious summing up of his ideas, as he once put it. American intellectuals are a scarce commodity: even more scarce are those kinds of intellectuals who are well-read in the evolution of human culture. In fact, as far as I can tell, we don't have any of these guys left: Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Campbell and Lewis Mumford were the last of the breed. Thompson is still living, and this book is required reading for anyone who wants an overview of his main ideas.

What are those main ideas? Well, according to cultural studies theoreticians of the left, the days of grand historical metanarratives are over, and so books like Thompson's are not read by such "intellectuals" and they are usually passed over with condescending silence by academics. Too bad. The disease of specialization is ruining our universities, which churn out hordes of defensive little primates who sit on their trees snarling at anyone who comes near their areas of expertise. Such individuals have no interest in comprehending history as a whole.

Thompson's idea is that human culture has evolved through a series of ecologically embedded mindfields, each with its own particular characteristics. The arithmetic mentality of the ancient riverrine civilizations, for example, is very different in its manner of thinking from the geometrical mentality of the oceanic societies like the ancient Greeks. And the Galilean mentality of northern Atlantic civilization is different yet again, as is the complex dynamical systems mentality that has emerged since the nineteenth century.

While keeping these mentalities in mind, Thompson walks the reader through civilization's great literary texts and epics, such as the Ramayana or the Tao Te Ching or the Upanishads. He examines these texts with an eye for detail and with an intuitive feeling for the concrete that is completely missing from the hyperabstractions of Ken Wilber's books. Jean Gebser had a strong influence on both Thompson and Wilber, but for someone who has read all of these thinkers, it is evident that it is Thompson who understands and carries on the Gebserian tradition, and not Wilber.

Wilber is the simulacrum; Thompson is the genuine article. But Americans have a tendency to prefer the fake over the real: Cool Whip over real whipped cream, for example; or Cheese Whiz over actual cheese; or computer simulacra of museums rather than actual museums with real works of art in them. You get the idea. And this helps to explain why people read Wilber and ignore Thompson.

(SEE ALSO MY LECTURE ON THOMPSON ON YOU TUBE)

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" and "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons."

This is the most difficult book I have read in quite some time. As a consequence, it is one of the most rewarding books I have encountered, and I carry the sense that I will be peeling back the layers for a long time to come. In this it reminds me of R. Buckminster Fuller's SYNERGETICS: the reader is encountering a world view which challenges long unquestioned assumptions and offers a reinterpretation of intellectual and spiritual history. It is not at all surprising to discover that Thompson, like Fuller, found his wellspring in mathematics, though Bucky was the child of Transcendentalists, while this author grew up in Catholicism. Where to begin? This volume is drawn from a series of lectures the author delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City, under the auspices of the Lindesfarne Fellowship. (Lindesfarne was formed by the author in the early 70s to bring together scientists, artists, philosophers, et. al., to explore the future of consciousness.) His discussions draw on texts and artifacts from the very ancient to the most modern, and one difficulty in my fully comprehending his meaning lies in this reader's shallow knowledge of many of the source texts. That is to say, I can follow his arguments based on the brief quotes and descriptions offered, but I do not share his deep familiarity with Babylonian or Egyptian myths, with the epic tales of Ur, the Indian Vedas, Taoism, Confucianism, or the multiple variations on Quetzalcoatl in ancient tropical America. Sometimes I felt a little at sea. A synopsis will not do this work justice, but here is my best current shot: Archaeological evidence and ancient texts indicate that there was a universal religion in the distant past. Evidence of belief in the Great Mother has turned up on every continent. It celebrated timelessness, fecundity, the mystery of all in one. Maleness was part of Femaleness. A shift occured on both the physical and mythic levels in which the son wrested power from the mother and eventually became dominant. The shift from Matriarchy to Patriarchy is one shorthand way to describe this change. This story is evidently implicit in all of the older myths preceding the version most familiar to our culture, in which the Father's son is the lead player, the Son who has come to rule both heaven and earth. One crucial difference between Matriarchy and Patriarchy is the shift from belief in a universal source to assertion of an individual source. Though this is my own observation, not Thompson's - one practical demonstration of this shift is that up until the advent of DNA testing, fatherhood has been essentially a judicial matter, not biological. Therefore, succession of kings, or inheritance of property or title, or assertion of divinity based on being the son of a particular father, has always been subject to dispute. Motherhood (again, up until the advent of today's science - in vitro fertilization) has always been self-evident. The author traces two thousand year cycles of emergence and crisis in a succession of cultural and mythic traditions, but sorts out enduring threads of truth. Heisenbergian uncertainty was already well understood before the oldest records in textual form. The observer changes the observation. In mathematical terms, Thompson follows our development from the arithmetic, to the geometric, to the algebraic, now morphing into the science of chaos. And in this shift, he finds a resurgence of the most ancient. One cause does not have one effect. One effect does not have a single source. The widely described "butterfly effect," suggesting that a Monarch in Mexico can cause a monsoon in Malaysia, illustrates this point. I can no longer assert that I am simply the offspring of two parents, I am the result of everything that happened before now. In conclusion the author suggests that we have come to another point of bifurcation, that the forces of commercial globalization are forcing a consciousness shift to global awareness. The two roads he foresees are GATT and NAFTA versus Zen, and he believes the only way we can avoid a dark age in which authoritarianism and militarism subjugate humanity is to go within. Reminding us of Lao Tzu, he says that the unyielding is prone to failure, while flexibility is strong. "If a soldier is rigid, he won't win; If a tree is rigid, it will come to its end. Rigidity and power occupy the inferior position; Suppleness, softness, weakness and delicateness occupy the superior position." Lao Tzu reminds us that a dead body is rigid, while a baby is flexible. Thompson fervently believes our brightest future lies between exhaling and inhaling, in the transfiguring moment when one returns to full knowledge of the Great Mother. "Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. Whispered words of wisdom. Let it be." -Lennon and McCartney

Why is William Irwin Thompson so little read, so little known, so little talked about? I think it is because he isn't easy to read, classify or pin-down. His thinking is a performance of what he talks about: the dawning integral consciousness, fluid and insightful, a psycho-sensual expression of knowledge-art.

Thompson traverses a wide territory, touching on everything from Ken Wilber to Zecharia Sitchin, Rudolf Steiner to Marshall McLuhan, molecular biology to Egyptian mythology. Anyone interested in "integral thinking" should give him a read--an important poetic counterpoint to Ken Wilber's systemizations.

This book is brilliant and entertaining, if a little too pompous for my tastes. The author's city, New York, is exalted as a sort of Mecca of consciousness. Meanwhile, he never misses an opportunity to write derisively about California, and dismissively about its contributions to spiritual advancement. You can almost hear him hissing every time he writes "New Age". This all seems very gratuitous to me, uncalled for (why does he have such a bone to pick? Is he trying to prove he is superior? Does he "protest too much" in trying to distance himself from any New Age associations?), and furthermore makes me wonder just what degree of spiritual attainment he himself has reached. I would hope the emerging consciousness his writing makes a case for will be free of the cheap shots this otherwise exceptional book is unfortunately peppered with.