Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (William Irwin Thompson)
"Mind Jazz for the Literary and Cultural Cognoscenti"
[My three-star Amazon review (February 27, 2013) of "Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness" by William Irwin Thompson
If I remember correctly, the first time I encountered William Irwin Thompson was in a Bill Moyers interview on TV some time in the ‘70s. Dr. Thompson, an MIT (or maybe at that time already an ex-MIT) literature professor, got my attention when he summarized coming global transformation as the “Los Angelization of the planet.” I never forgot those telling words, but I didn’t keep track of Dr. Thompson and had no idea what happened with him… until several months ago, when I purchased “Coming into Being.”
“Coming into Being” is “mind jazz,” the unstructured philosophical ramblings of an old, disaffected intellectual bemoaning the deculturalization of the planet. Dr. Thompson is big on narratives—he even sees modern science as being narrative (rather than truth)-oriented—and his is the need for a cultural renaissance to resurrect the fallen, or soulless, state of modern humanity.
Dr. Thompson’s discourse, or ramblings, on the Zeitgeist takes place through twelve chapters, and include forays into such subjects as weird myths about human origins, prehistoric sculptures, the patriarchal construction of society, shifts from the arithmetic to the geometric mentality, the Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita, and chaos dynamics and the cosmic feminine in the Tao Te Ching. If these subjects interest you, you’ll probably find his book an enjoyable read. Unfortunately, most of the cultural-historical subjects that interest Thompson are not my thing, and I ended up skipping pages to get to more stimulating material.
Unless you’re a member of the literary cognoscenti—and I’m not—you’ll need a dictionary handy when you read Dr. Thompson, who has an affinity for uncommon language. Words such as lafundia, agon, ecumene, mimesis, technoswill were all new to me. It would be easy to accuse Dr. Thompson of being an intellectual snob, opting for obscure language when simpler would work just as well; but the man is a stylist, and his literary riffs can lead one into an altered mental state.
Dr. Thompson is not a fan of Integral thinker KenWilber, rejecting his rigid structuring, boxing, and systematization, but he offers no real vision of his own—and that’s what disappointed me most about the book. I was hoping for a brilliant intellectual synthesis, but all I got was—“mind jazz” --and I prefer “mind rock,” structured mental melodies that I can grab hold of and use to further my own development and understanding of life.
[My three-star Amazon review (February 27, 2013) of "Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness" by William Irwin Thompson
If I remember correctly, the first time I encountered William Irwin Thompson was in a Bill Moyers interview on TV some time in the ‘70s. Dr. Thompson, an MIT (or maybe at that time already an ex-MIT) literature professor, got my attention when he summarized coming global transformation as the “Los Angelization of the planet.” I never forgot those telling words, but I didn’t keep track of Dr. Thompson and had no idea what happened with him… until several months ago, when I purchased “Coming into Being.”
“Coming into Being” is “mind jazz,” the unstructured philosophical ramblings of an old, disaffected intellectual bemoaning the deculturalization of the planet. Dr. Thompson is big on narratives—he even sees modern science as being narrative (rather than truth)-oriented—and his is the need for a cultural renaissance to resurrect the fallen, or soulless, state of modern humanity.
Dr. Thompson’s discourse, or ramblings, on the Zeitgeist takes place through twelve chapters, and include forays into such subjects as weird myths about human origins, prehistoric sculptures, the patriarchal construction of society, shifts from the arithmetic to the geometric mentality, the Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita, and chaos dynamics and the cosmic feminine in the Tao Te Ching. If these subjects interest you, you’ll probably find his book an enjoyable read. Unfortunately, most of the cultural-historical subjects that interest Thompson are not my thing, and I ended up skipping pages to get to more stimulating material.
Unless you’re a member of the literary cognoscenti—and I’m not—you’ll need a dictionary handy when you read Dr. Thompson, who has an affinity for uncommon language. Words such as lafundia, agon, ecumene, mimesis, technoswill were all new to me. It would be easy to accuse Dr. Thompson of being an intellectual snob, opting for obscure language when simpler would work just as well; but the man is a stylist, and his literary riffs can lead one into an altered mental state.
Dr. Thompson is not a fan of Integral thinker KenWilber, rejecting his rigid structuring, boxing, and systematization, but he offers no real vision of his own—and that’s what disappointed me most about the book. I was hoping for a brilliant intellectual synthesis, but all I got was—“mind jazz” --and I prefer “mind rock,” structured mental melodies that I can grab hold of and use to further my own development and understanding of life.
