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January 16, 2005
William Irwin Thompson: Visions of a Holistic Future
This is a follow-up post to Building a Robust Psychedelic Community
According to William Irwin Thompson, the founder of the Lindisfarne Association and author of many books on the future, humanity is passing through a collective spiritual initiation. This process has three phases:
1. The illumination of the shadow side
2. Discovery of the edge of sanity
3. Defeat of the ego
According to Thompson, these stages and changes will affect different sections of society at different times. The first will be teh various spiritual communities; next the artistic community; then the scientists and; finally the politicians.
According to Thompson, there are different cultural forces at work to reshape the planet. The first is an emergent sense of world community. The second is the decentralization of cities. The third is the miniaturization of technology. The fourth is the interiorization of consciousness.
These four forces are working to create a new model for living - what he calls the meta-industrial village. Such villages would be characterized by:
1. Energy self-sufficiency
2. Agricultural self-sufficiency
3. Cottage industries for production of salable goods
4. Education of body mind and spirit for village members.
My question: Does this make sense? Is such a future as outlined by Thompson viable? Are there any indications of the growth of any meta-industrial village in the western world?
I found this WIT, William Irwin Thompson new writing link on a blog>> this is State of the Artistry!>
"PostPosted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 9:52 pm Post subject: Neocons
I am pleased to present a favorite writer of Ocean Arks International, William Irwin Thompson. Although not specifically addressing metaphysical postulates, William writes in a manner taking these methods heavily into account and to very good effect.
In Volume XXII, Number 3, 2004, of Annals of Earth, William offered up "Al Qaeda, the Neocons, and the Transition from Nation-State to Noetic Polity"
What follows is a completely unedited version of the story. I will put a link to a cleaner RTF version at the bottom. I can come back later and spiffy this one up:
Al Qaeda, the Neocons, and the Transition from Nation-State to Noetic Polity
William Erwin Thompson
Even without an apocalyptic world scenario, humanity has already passed an event horizon that is drawing it from one attractor to another. This end of conventional history involves a morphological distortion of our time in space, one that alters both our bodies and our body-politic. Outside becomes inside, as microtechnologies enter our bodies through MIT's celebrated "wear-ware," and international terrorists enter our old territorial twentieth-century nation state space. At the same time, inside becomes outside as consciousness becomes an endosymbiont inside a global noosphere of networked computers. In this meta-historical crossing of within and without, a singularity appears and traditional culture dissolves, and the residues of melted cultures become religious toxic wastes in fundamentalist violence everywhere: Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Sikh.
In the evolution of the primates, the hominids developed into consciousness-bearing animals. This large brain structure requires a content, so humans will fill it with whatever comes to mind: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or an absurdly personified and vengeful parental God. Religion, with its systems of explanation, is a fundamental expression of human consciousness, but we do need to remember that religion is only one highly limited and time-bound expression of human spirituality, and that in the evolution of human culture there have been three stages of development: 1. prehistoric shamanism, 2. literate religions and mythological systems, and 3. science and a postreligious form of spirituality. Einstein is a good exemplar of stage three. Continued on site>
http://www.peakoil.com/post42493.html
Ocean Arks International>>>been around since the early
Whole Earth Catalog/Whole Earth Review days>>
The rule of no realm is mine, but all worthy things
that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care.
And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task
if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair
or bear fruit and flower again in days to come.
For I too am a steward. Did you not know?
J.R.R. Tolkien
Annals of Earth seeks, through written communication, to foster the emergence of a lasting planetary culture. It is published three times a year by Ocean Arks International and edited by Nancy Jack Todd. Selected archived articles from past Annals can be found below.
http://www.oceanarks.org/annals/
latest book by W I Thompson>>Self & Society with sample chap.>
http://www.imprint.co.uk/books/bill_thompson.html
The studies in this volume grew out of my eighteen-year collaboration
with the chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, so I would like
to put this work on cultural history into the cultural history of my
own work with my Lindisfarne Association colleagues in the period
of the last two decades of the twentieth century.
In the 1980s, a group of video and electronic artists, computer scientists,
mathematicans, and ‘new edgey’ sorts of thinkers was
founded in Los Angeles by the late Andra Akers and called Synergy
International. In the fall of 1985, I was in New York, conducting a
symposium on the Gaia theory of Lovelock and Margulis1 when
Andra asked me to come to Los Angeles for the weekend to give an
informal talk at the Los Angeles Film Institute in response to what I
would see there in a conference cum performance of artists in the
new electronic and computing media.2 As part of this gathering,
Andra arranged a party at her house in West Hollywood in which all
the artists and scientists took part. One of the people I just had to
meet, Andra insisted, was the mathematician and chaos theorist
from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Ralph Abraham.