This is one of those few intellectual works that can truely change one's understanding of how things work. A profound analysis of historical change that presents both models of change and societal models.

I chose to read this book for a university history class where we had to find a book and make a presentation on HOW the book was written and presented rather than the history that was in the book. Thompason did a marverlous job at letting the public know what exactly happened during the uprising of Bloody Sunday 1916. I recommend this book to everyone and anyone interested in the politics of the time.

Islands Out of Time is an engaging, compelling novel. The drama of the end of Atlantis is created through interesting characters and a complex scenario. The esoteric references are well woven through this well written novel. Thompson is a poet and an historian = he brings all his skills into the writing of this book. I wish he'd write more novels.

David Spangler and William Irwin Thompson "reimagine" the New-Age in this clear, sometimes shocking discussion. Based around the forums of two major New-Age conventions in 1988 and 1989, their visons and interpretations of countless aspects of what is commonly referred to as the "New Age" are the kind of candid, honest appeal to humanity that is so rare in this oftentimes overly-metaphysical genre. While the numinous aspects of reality are not spared (they fully discuss astral projection, channelling, and the like of modern "crystal worshippers"), what is refreshing is the humor and human-ness which accompany their insight. Being a reader who was raised with the concepts of past-life regression and karma as a moral and spiritual guidepost, I have often struggled with the paradoxical nature of the new-age movement. Seeming inacessible, lofty, and pretentious, this emotionally indulgent attempt at enlightmennt sent me searching Christianity for answers. Needless to say, I arrived at the discovery that both crystals and Christ can be limiting. Thus, my finding Spangler's and Thompson's exegesis on their comprehensive experience as both founders and dissentors of the new-age movement was fortunate; their ideas will engender a synthesis of thought both full of enlightenment and common sense - a combination rare in the often-megalomaniacal realm of spirituality and religion.

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.

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 society. Like a marriage contract, whose value is not in its material existence as a piece of paper, some texts operate as a "consensual instrument," allowing, as Thompson puts it, a domain of meaning to come into play.

Like Thompson's other books, this one is not an easy read. It's in the business of limning texts as performances of the worldview in which they were generated, determined not only by culture but by gender and adaptive context. And it attempts, by its very form, to invoke as well as to describe what Thompson calls a hermeneutic of the imagination.

Understanding our current state of cultural organization as a bifurcation point, a time in which the traditional forms of literate civilization are undergoing an electronic meltdown, Thompson regards the present communicative medium as the concrete performance of a state of consciousness that is collective rather than individual. Our consensual vocabulary for understanding this evolution, however, is unremittingly technological, which has paved the way for immense corporate interests to define the emerging global landscape. Spirituality, accordingly, is devolving into archaic personal cosmologies.

"Coming into Being" is an attempt to jump, feet first, into that perceived breach between science and mysticism, between abstract scholarship and embodied folk wisdom, between self and Other, between being and Being, in order to celebrate the many textual images, both ancient and contemporary, of their potential integration. I loved this book -- even its recapitulation of "The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light" as though it were a text like any other, important for its ideas and images and not because Thompson happened to write it.

See my review of the hardback with 284 pages and twelve essays compared with 336 pages and fifteen essays. Hint: the last three essays bring Thompson's thoughts to a higher and more mature plane. Hence the hardback should merit four stars and the paperback rates five stars with me. Buy it! Gordon E. Beck, Ph. D., Emeritus Professor, The Evergreen State College, Olympia.

It is a shame that this book is now out of print. It should be required reading for all public policy majors, political science buffs and anyone working in foreign policy.

Thompson paints a rather frightening picture of misguided attempts to alleviate suffering in the world. Most of us feel compelled to either initiate or join up with efforts to end global poverty, to feed the starving and educate the illiterate citizens of the global community. However, many programs designed to help often end up hurting. For example, feeding starving children in a country unable to support its population may lead to additional suffering when these children reach sexual maturity and then bear still more offspring. What Thompson does in this enlightening volume is point out the irony of causing suffering by trying to allieviate it. He goes on to say that, of course, we must feed starving people because it is our nature to do so, but why not allow foreign policy to look at the big picture. If a country cannot sustain its population, the population must be controlled; all the food in the world sent to a starving nation will do no good in the long run unless the reasons for the dire situation are addressed and remedied.

This book had a significant impact on me when I read it over 15 years ago. Its message has not dimmed through the years and, if anything, is even more timely now that India's population has topped 1 billion.

Forget Joseph Campbell and his academic-minded ilk -- and take a journey on the wild side with W.I.T. There are very few others writing in the English language like W.I.T. who have all the necessary academic credentials (in his case teaching at MIT, etc.), plus all of the requisite real world credentials that come from creating Lindisfarne Assoc. from scratch. What this book does for the reader is creating a context and provide a place within which we can understand the truly mythic character of the human story, and thereby grasp the underlying evolutionary significance of our own moment in meta-history. Give this book the tie it deserves, because it can be a dense thicket. But passing through the thicket, even with the occasional thorn, is well owrth the price paid by an interested reader seeking larger truths about culture, language, history, and cosmos.

I just say it was the first time of mine. I just want to know about biology and hope you consider it.

An other reviewer mentioned Chomsky. The truth is, Thompson is a brilliant cultural critic/mythopoeic sociologist/poet observer but he is not superior to Chomsky if what you desire is a clearheaded and real world analysis of the forces and powers that are shaping our world. Chomsky is coming from the Enlightenment and Humanist traditions and knows exactly where his knowledge ends and continually informs the reader as to why he is saying what he is saying (he makes himself as transparent as possible). Thompson, by contrast, does the exact opposite. He entertainingly composes poetic banners of thought that are dense with aphoristic insight and cutting philo-historic observations. This is the only book of Thompson's that I've thus far read but I would like to read at least one more. He has a cool style and makes many points that intrigue or promote pondering. This book may best be described as a cross between thoughtful new age and pop philosophy.

Reading this book you will be able to undertand America and its myths. Thompson reads America from many perspectives: cognitive sciences, buddhism, continental philosophy,ciberpunk's novels, and keen observations about Epcot and Disney joins in a very intersting way to see America. Neither Baudrillard, nor Virilo, nor Chomsky, nor Lipovestky are so powerful as Thompson is.

Some interesting ideas about mythology, and some fine writing, are ruined by sloppy scholarship, wishful thinking, and general nonsense. The author either can't understand, or misrepresents, basic scientific thinking as well as Julian Jaynes, Noam Chomsky, Richard Leakey, and Charles Darwin. Thompson is obviously sharp enough to understand his primary sources -- and I'm afraid that he selectively quotes things out of context as well as setting up straw man fallacies. Meanwhile Thompson treats Edgar Cayce's past-life experience claims seriously. This book was highly reccomended and I was annoyed to find that it was new age hooey. For works on the psychology, sociology and history of myths stick to Cambell and Frazier

thompson is so dazzling a writer that, even when you don't agree with some of his conclusions, you are nevertheless thrilled to be taken along for this intellectual joyride through prehistory and myth. half the fun is the argument that this book will most assuredly start with yourself. new age mystic or not, thompson will forever change the way you perceive your world, in challenging many things you have previously taken for granted: patriarchy, sexuality, gender and identity, religion. literate, passionate, and eccentric--this is one of my favorite books.

Thompson takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the origins of culture, sex, agriculture and patriarchy.He does not solely rely on left brain abstract thinking, but has got the right side of the brain working too.In other words, he is into mythopoeic thinking, which gets down to deeper levels of existence.If for nothing else, this book is worth it for the sentence "Myth is the history of the soul."There is much wisdom in this sentence.Thompson has more insightful things to say about myth than many other writers on the subject.If he has a fault, it is a too wide sweep over his subject matter.Nevertheless, he has many challenging ideas to confront us with.

Thompson's ouvere is growing, and this book adds additional weight to an already impressive body of knoweldgge he's shepherding. The erudite and scientific core of what he offers balances well with the mytho-poetic, but in this book Thompson and thhe authors he gathers and edits do a good job of showing that the emerging science is something which can be discussed for lay-persons (like me and you) in ways that are graspable annd comprehensible.

Thhis is best read in parallel with one or tow of his own personal literary masterpieces (such as "The Time Falling Bodies Took to Light").