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

by William Irwin Thompson

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312158343
• ISBN13: 9780312158347
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

One of the Last Masterpieces of a Dying Tradition

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

Soulful mind improvisation

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.

A book that changed me.

Thompson is one of those authors who I wish that I had encountered years ago, and yet I simultaneously wonder if I could have comprehended him years ago -- or did I need all of the years of searching as mere preparation for the moment of discovering him? This was the first book that I read by Thompson, and although I'm glad, because I am now deeply hooked on him, I wonder how much more he has to offer. Well, I'm definitely going to order his recent books to find out! He mixes Buddhism, Gaia theory, Gebserian new age envisioning, and top notch literary scholarship into not a reified dogmatic doctrine, like other writers (read: Ken Wilber), but something more minimalistic and thereby somehow better: mind-jazz, or Wissenkunst, as Thompson perfectly characterizes his own work. 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.

A scholar and intellectual, at full gallop

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.

Vintage Thompson Mind-Jazz

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 soci