Buy new:
-17% $19.13
FREE delivery Sunday, October 13 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Ships from: Amazon.com
Sold by: Amazon.com
$19.13 with 17 percent savings
List Price: $22.99
The List Price is the suggested retail price of a new product as provided by a manufacturer, supplier, or seller. Except for books, Amazon will display a List Price if the product was purchased by customers on Amazon or offered by other retailers at or above the List Price in at least the past 90 days. List prices may not necessarily reflect the product's prevailing market price.
Learn more
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
FREE delivery Sunday, October 13 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or Prime members get FREE delivery Thursday, October 10. Order within 18 hrs 34 mins.
In Stock
$$19.13 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$19.13
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
Amazon.com
Ships from
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Returns
30-day refund/replacement
30-day refund/replacement
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Read full return policy
Returns
30-day refund/replacement
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Read full return policy
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Payment
Secure transaction
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
$14.17
Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less See less
FREE delivery October 18 - 23. Details
Or fastest delivery October 17 - 21. Details
In stock
$$19.13 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$19.13
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Ships from and sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

William Irwin Thompson
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness Paperback – June 15, 1998

4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 12 ratings
See all formats and editions
{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$19.13","priceAmount":19.13,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"19","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"13","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"qf%2F%2FmcEqWot0MTvHa%2BBUVlIpxwIWXBmaV8Gn6MP6U%2BEpHe8NqUEwlO1q%2FPtCoF7c9rBplrycF7dF6l2CJUR1J%2Bd51BfNg2%2F3ZuVp23XStIyzlKluVt%2FlJXBBBZOlY7fZsCyHX6w74c4%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$14.17","priceAmount":14.17,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"14","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"17","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"qf%2F%2FmcEqWot0MTvHa%2BBUVlIpxwIWXBmaHZeb5Orj73pkugtq2UaB6EO1c5L4b86Z2OV9zwjwIbY1UvbTd8ycGQZbGUhWHAW5vM2nvDQeX%2FakCG9BEKyMqeOZ777EmUvO1lstk1%2FhKGDCQ3l1lsi5QHQlztoA4GM%2B57OaJCA35Bc%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

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.

Previous slide of product details
  1. Print length
    284 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    June 15, 1998
  4. Dimensions
    6 x 0.79 x 9 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    0312176929
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0312176921
  7. See all details
Next slide of product details
Books with Buzz
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more

Frequently bought together

Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness
This item: Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness
$19.13
Get it as soon as Sunday, Oct 13
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture
$22.05
Get it as soon as Sunday, Oct 13
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
Beyond Religion: The Cultural Evolution of the Sense of the Sacred: From Shamanism to Religion to Post-religious Spirituality
$15.17
Get it Oct 22 - 24
In stock
Usually ships within 3 to 4 days.
Ships from and sold by Anderson Family Library.
Total price: $00
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Details
Added to Cart
spCSRF_Treatment
Some of these items ship sooner than the others.
Show details Hide details
Choose items to buy together.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“wide-ranging and deep essays...Thompson [is] an adventurous thinker.” ―Publishers Weekly

About the Author

William Irwin Thompson is the author of At the Edge of History, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light and Imaginary Landscapes. He lives in Switzerland.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Griffin (June 15, 1998)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 284 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312176929
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312176921
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.14 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.79 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 12 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

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

4.9 out of 5 stars
12 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

WirelessWonk_FL
5.0 out of 5 stars You could try to find inspiration in 1 facet like scripture, science or the arts, or just read Thompson and behold the prism
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2017
Verified Purchase
Sorry this won't be a lengthy, analytical review; maybe another time. Just want to add my voice to the many others here who are amazed by the scope of this man's intellect and his grasp of seemingly disparate disciplines, events and histories. You may not have enough background knowledge to understand many of his allusions and references; I know I didn't when I first read him decades ago. Be patient. Learn whatever you need to, in good time.
4 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Cecil Bothwell
5.0 out of 5 stars Nothing and beingness
Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2007
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
10 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Jonny Bardo, Spiritual Superhero
5.0 out of 5 stars Soulful mind improvisation
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2007
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.
7 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Andy Boerger
4.0 out of 5 stars Why all the California put downs?
Reviewed in the United States on December 25, 2009
Verified Purchase
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.
5 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Gordon E. Beck, Ph. D., Emeritus Prof
5.0 out of 5 stars Buy this book. It has ALL of Thompson's work.
Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2000
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.
14 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report

Top reviews from other countries

A D Botham
5.0 out of 5 stars A Climactic Text for our period in Human Evolution
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2013
Verified Purchase
Absolutely brilliant. Coming into Being is up there with Jean Gebser's Everpresent Origins and Teilhard de Chardin's Phenomenon of Man together with the best writings of Ken Wilber. An essential text on the evolution of consciousness.
3 people found this helpful
 Report