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Passages about earth;: An exploration of the new planetary culture
Continuing the searching study of contemporary society he began in At the Edge of History-a national book award candidate that has become a modern classic-William Irwin Thompson now discusses the new planetary culture he sees emerging from the cracks in the old civilization of industrial nation states. Passages about Earth is at once an apocalyptic statement about the present condition of man and a testament of faith in the future of a spiritually evolve mankind.
- GenresHistoryTheoryPhilosophy
206 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
William Irwin Thompson
50 books35 followersWilliam Irwin Thompson is an American social philosopher, cultural critic, and poet. He received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He is the founder of the Lindisfarne Association.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 21, 2019
Aware of cracks in the culture of the corporate-industrial-state, William Irwin Thompson Ph.D., professor, poet, author, and a founding member of Lindisfarne Association, drew up a new world view detailed in the chapter Planetary Mythologies in this book.
1. There is intelligent life in the universe beyond earth.
2. The meeting we are expecting in front of us in linear time has already occurred, is now occurring, and will continue to occur. The gods do not talk to (emphasis) us, they play through (emphasis) with (emphasis) our history.
3. There is more to our history than the meager records of six thousand years. Our religious myths are the detritus of the lost history of the earth.
4. Our subjective-objective distinctions about reality are incorrect. As in the world view of the Hopi Indians. Matter, Energy, and Consciousness form a continuum.
He cautioned, "To work 'within the system' of technology' is to be turned into a functionary of the tool; to wield a tool one must grasp it from the outside (p.143)."
One more thing about mythology and the unconscious: "An idea in the collective unconscious is what Levi Strauss would call a structure, but when that structure is performed in an individual's consciousness, it takes on the limitations of the personal content. The mythical image from the collective unconscious must travel through the distorting medium of the receiver. A mixture of the myth and the noise from the distorting medium is what reaches the receiver; so in order to be certain that he has the message right, the listener has to hear several different versions until he grasps the structure (p. 126)."
1. There is intelligent life in the universe beyond earth.
2. The meeting we are expecting in front of us in linear time has already occurred, is now occurring, and will continue to occur. The gods do not talk to (emphasis) us, they play through (emphasis) with (emphasis) our history.
3. There is more to our history than the meager records of six thousand years. Our religious myths are the detritus of the lost history of the earth.
4. Our subjective-objective distinctions about reality are incorrect. As in the world view of the Hopi Indians. Matter, Energy, and Consciousness form a continuum.
He cautioned, "To work 'within the system' of technology' is to be turned into a functionary of the tool; to wield a tool one must grasp it from the outside (p.143)."
One more thing about mythology and the unconscious: "An idea in the collective unconscious is what Levi Strauss would call a structure, but when that structure is performed in an individual's consciousness, it takes on the limitations of the personal content. The mythical image from the collective unconscious must travel through the distorting medium of the receiver. A mixture of the myth and the noise from the distorting medium is what reaches the receiver; so in order to be certain that he has the message right, the listener has to hear several different versions until he grasps the structure (p. 126)."
April 2, 2026
WILL THERE BE A ‘PLANETARY TRANSFORMATION’ OF CIVILIZATION TO ‘PLANETIZATION’?
William Irwin Thompson (1938-2020) was a professor of humanities at MIT and New York University in Toronto. In 1972 he founded the Lindisfarne Association for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture.” [It closed its doors in 2012.]
He wrote in this 1974 book, “Something has already happened, something so vast that all our social-science descriptions of man cannot add up to it. The record of civilization is over, and like a record at its end, it keeps going on with the noise of a needle stuck in its rut: the revolution of the workers, the protest of the young, the new creations of the avant-garde, the rise of new forms of sexual liberation, the appearance of new religions. This side of history is over, and on the other side is myth.” (Pg. 11)
He states, “the culture will remain the same until the problem is seen as a whole. The problem as a whole is that our institutions are no longer in sync with pattern of human growth through time. We think that time is a line that moves from bad to better, from poverty to progress, from ignorance to knowledge… The sins of the fathers are passed on to the sons; and this unfortunate patrimony is our inheritance from the industrial era.” (Pg. 15)
He suggests, “a new cultural revolution is taking place and the priorities of life are being set in the scale against GNPs and Ph.D.s. The revolution is one in which the energy of culture shifts from institutions to the whole environment. Religion moves out of churches, education moves out of schools, business moves out of factories, and politics moves out of the party system… The most immediate attempt to block the cultural transformation is management’s effort to maintain industrial values and procedures through its institutional power…” (Pg. 25-26)
He asserts, “If we wish to achieve a planetary transformation of human culture, we must go beyond the authoritarian conspiracies … and the technocratic elitism of the Club of Rome to raise into consciousness the cosmic mythologies that are now sweeping over the planet. We do not need any more ‘politics’ than we already have.” (Pg. 81)
He observes, “The best way to protect spirituality from religion is to have a secular counterforce to the sacred. One can select the priests of Israel, but no one can select her prophets; they come not out of civilization but out of the wildness of the desert… But there is one advantage that a religion has over science as an elite system. In religion the top and bottom of society can think the same thought, though not in the same way.” (Pg. 116-117)
He contends, “A new ideology is being created in advance of its social need; what particular institutional form this ideology will take no one can say… Mystics think that they are solitary visionaries of God, but actually, in the transition from civilization to planetization, they have become the true political scientists.” (Pg. 140)
He notes, “Under the threat of species annihilation, Homo Sapiens is trying to accomplish its transformation into a new species. Since aeons ago man made his own culture into the vehicle of his evolution, the appearance of this new species is to be found not in individual babies… but in the cultural vehicle itself… But the most immediate danger of our technological system of management is that it is interfering with the movements of cultural evolution that are making man ready for planetization… Just as once Pythagoras took the East into Greece to create the foundation of Western civilization, so has his spirit returned to take India into America to create the foundation of our earthly planetization.” (Pg 147)
He states, “In fact, only man’s religious myths have been thinking on a scale large enough to deal with what is happening. If man is coming to the end of hominization, the next step in human evolution cannot be simply another tool… The next step will be like the transformation that altered an ape into a man, and looking at our planetary mythologies, we can see that this is what we have been waiting form.” (Pg. 149)
He argues, “We have to accept the fact that we now live in a time when the esoteric traditions of Christianity are now dead, and the esoteric traditions of Western science are fast dying, so that the whole light of the civilization that came out of Christian Europe is flickering toward a new age of darkness… If you wish to go back to the point at which Christianity took the wrong turn… you must go back to Lindisfarne [Island in England] to see the clash between the esoteric Christianity of Jesus and John and the ecclesiastical Christianity ABOUT Jesus but OF Peter and Paul.” (Pg. 154-155)
He suggests, “In the days when the normal scientific paradigm was conquering the world, art was a holding action for the spirit but now that that age is over we seem to be moving away from marking time with works of art to taking our selves seriously again. The edge of the culture has moved beyond reading the science fiction of C.S. Lewis to living in communities like Findhorn. For whatever reason, we are now in a cultural position to move beyond the stages of the Crazies and the Artists to take the ideas of Findhorn seriously.” (Pg. 168)
He summarizes, “In the 20th century two quite different steps have been taken toward the creation of a collective consciousness. The first was the enforced integration of the individual mind with the collectivity of the Total State in Soviet Russia or Marxist China. The second was the unforced lifting of the collective unconscious into culture and was the work of scholars like Freud and Jung, and artists like Blake, Wordsworth, and Kafka. A ‘spirit of the age’ seems to be the most familiar form of collective consciousness… If you are frightened as you consider these ideas, it is a sign that you understand the implications only too well. In the first wave of this evolutionary transformation of man, the rise of the collective unconscious into culture stimulated the political revolutions of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. The integration of the individual mind with the collective consciousness must be free, as it is in art or religion; but if art or religion is used to enforce the integration, then we do not have the Mystical Body of Christ but the demonic body of Satan.” (Pg. 174-176)
Thompson seems very much taken by the Indian yogis Sri Aurobindo (1870-1950) and Gopi Krishna (1903-1984), and he cites them frequently; e.g., “What the followers of Aurobindo see themselves as doing in Auroville is preparing a new planetary city for a new kind of man” (Pg. 51-52); “By stepping to the side of Indian and Western systems of education, [Gopi Krishna] has moved into an area of personal experience that now seems to be at the forefront of both Indian and Western culture.” (Pg. 105-106) But he also reports, “because Sri Aurobindo did not serve Gopi Krishna as a Tantric guru, Gopi Krishna concluded that Aurobindo was merely a writer of books and that he [Gopi Krishna] alone of modern yogis had discovered … ‘The Secret of Yoga.’” (Pg. 107)
Thompson’s musings seemed much more ‘prophetic’ back in the 1970s; he had some influence in the early New Age movement.
William Irwin Thompson (1938-2020) was a professor of humanities at MIT and New York University in Toronto. In 1972 he founded the Lindisfarne Association for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture.” [It closed its doors in 2012.]
He wrote in this 1974 book, “Something has already happened, something so vast that all our social-science descriptions of man cannot add up to it. The record of civilization is over, and like a record at its end, it keeps going on with the noise of a needle stuck in its rut: the revolution of the workers, the protest of the young, the new creations of the avant-garde, the rise of new forms of sexual liberation, the appearance of new religions. This side of history is over, and on the other side is myth.” (Pg. 11)
He states, “the culture will remain the same until the problem is seen as a whole. The problem as a whole is that our institutions are no longer in sync with pattern of human growth through time. We think that time is a line that moves from bad to better, from poverty to progress, from ignorance to knowledge… The sins of the fathers are passed on to the sons; and this unfortunate patrimony is our inheritance from the industrial era.” (Pg. 15)
He suggests, “a new cultural revolution is taking place and the priorities of life are being set in the scale against GNPs and Ph.D.s. The revolution is one in which the energy of culture shifts from institutions to the whole environment. Religion moves out of churches, education moves out of schools, business moves out of factories, and politics moves out of the party system… The most immediate attempt to block the cultural transformation is management’s effort to maintain industrial values and procedures through its institutional power…” (Pg. 25-26)
He asserts, “If we wish to achieve a planetary transformation of human culture, we must go beyond the authoritarian conspiracies … and the technocratic elitism of the Club of Rome to raise into consciousness the cosmic mythologies that are now sweeping over the planet. We do not need any more ‘politics’ than we already have.” (Pg. 81)
He observes, “The best way to protect spirituality from religion is to have a secular counterforce to the sacred. One can select the priests of Israel, but no one can select her prophets; they come not out of civilization but out of the wildness of the desert… But there is one advantage that a religion has over science as an elite system. In religion the top and bottom of society can think the same thought, though not in the same way.” (Pg. 116-117)
He contends, “A new ideology is being created in advance of its social need; what particular institutional form this ideology will take no one can say… Mystics think that they are solitary visionaries of God, but actually, in the transition from civilization to planetization, they have become the true political scientists.” (Pg. 140)
He notes, “Under the threat of species annihilation, Homo Sapiens is trying to accomplish its transformation into a new species. Since aeons ago man made his own culture into the vehicle of his evolution, the appearance of this new species is to be found not in individual babies… but in the cultural vehicle itself… But the most immediate danger of our technological system of management is that it is interfering with the movements of cultural evolution that are making man ready for planetization… Just as once Pythagoras took the East into Greece to create the foundation of Western civilization, so has his spirit returned to take India into America to create the foundation of our earthly planetization.” (Pg 147)
He states, “In fact, only man’s religious myths have been thinking on a scale large enough to deal with what is happening. If man is coming to the end of hominization, the next step in human evolution cannot be simply another tool… The next step will be like the transformation that altered an ape into a man, and looking at our planetary mythologies, we can see that this is what we have been waiting form.” (Pg. 149)
He argues, “We have to accept the fact that we now live in a time when the esoteric traditions of Christianity are now dead, and the esoteric traditions of Western science are fast dying, so that the whole light of the civilization that came out of Christian Europe is flickering toward a new age of darkness… If you wish to go back to the point at which Christianity took the wrong turn… you must go back to Lindisfarne [Island in England] to see the clash between the esoteric Christianity of Jesus and John and the ecclesiastical Christianity ABOUT Jesus but OF Peter and Paul.” (Pg. 154-155)
He suggests, “In the days when the normal scientific paradigm was conquering the world, art was a holding action for the spirit but now that that age is over we seem to be moving away from marking time with works of art to taking our selves seriously again. The edge of the culture has moved beyond reading the science fiction of C.S. Lewis to living in communities like Findhorn. For whatever reason, we are now in a cultural position to move beyond the stages of the Crazies and the Artists to take the ideas of Findhorn seriously.” (Pg. 168)
He summarizes, “In the 20th century two quite different steps have been taken toward the creation of a collective consciousness. The first was the enforced integration of the individual mind with the collectivity of the Total State in Soviet Russia or Marxist China. The second was the unforced lifting of the collective unconscious into culture and was the work of scholars like Freud and Jung, and artists like Blake, Wordsworth, and Kafka. A ‘spirit of the age’ seems to be the most familiar form of collective consciousness… If you are frightened as you consider these ideas, it is a sign that you understand the implications only too well. In the first wave of this evolutionary transformation of man, the rise of the collective unconscious into culture stimulated the political revolutions of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. The integration of the individual mind with the collective consciousness must be free, as it is in art or religion; but if art or religion is used to enforce the integration, then we do not have the Mystical Body of Christ but the demonic body of Satan.” (Pg. 174-176)
Thompson seems very much taken by the Indian yogis Sri Aurobindo (1870-1950) and Gopi Krishna (1903-1984), and he cites them frequently; e.g., “What the followers of Aurobindo see themselves as doing in Auroville is preparing a new planetary city for a new kind of man” (Pg. 51-52); “By stepping to the side of Indian and Western systems of education, [Gopi Krishna] has moved into an area of personal experience that now seems to be at the forefront of both Indian and Western culture.” (Pg. 105-106) But he also reports, “because Sri Aurobindo did not serve Gopi Krishna as a Tantric guru, Gopi Krishna concluded that Aurobindo was merely a writer of books and that he [Gopi Krishna] alone of modern yogis had discovered … ‘The Secret of Yoga.’” (Pg. 107)
Thompson’s musings seemed much more ‘prophetic’ back in the 1970s; he had some influence in the early New Age movement.
May 15, 2021
No recollection of this, but found it in my reading log from 1986
November 19, 2019
" 'You know,' Meadows answered, 'it's pretty hard to carry on a conversation with you. You're talking on several tracks at once.' "
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews