Coming Into Being

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 Bundestag, 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.

Foreword * Our Contemporary Predicament and Our Present Evolution of Consciousness * The Past Evolution of Consciousness: From Spirochete to Spinal Chord * Science and the Construction of Mythic Narratives About Human Origins * Weird Myths About Human Origins: The Strange Cases of Zecharia Sitchin and Rudolph Steiner * Prehistoric Sculptures: The Body as the Story of Time * From Prehistoric Sculpture to Folktale to Civilized Literature * The Hero Versus the Initiate in the Masculine Encounter with Death * The Patriarchal Construction of Culture and the Reimagination of the Female Body * The Shift From the Arithmatic to the Geometric Mentality * The Alliance of the Animal and the Human in the Expulsion of the Demonic From the Physical World * The Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita * The Road Not Taken: Chaos Dynamics and the Cosmic Feminine in the Tao Te Ching * Notes * Index