This title presents a series of essays on the evolution of culture, dealing with topics including the city and consciousness, evolution of the afterlife, literary and mathematical archetypes, machine consciousness and the implications of 9/11, and the invasion of Iraq. The enlarged new edition contains extra essays and brings the author's comments on current affairs up to date with coverage of the election of Barak Obama as US President.

The studies in this volume concern cultural history. They grew out of the author's work over the last two decades with colleagues in the Lindisfarne Association, and especially his eighteen-year collaboration with the chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham.

In this unique little book, cultural historian William Irwin Thompson argues that we are approaching the end of the age of religion, and entering into a new era of post-religious spirituality. Addressing the explosion of religious fundamentalist violence around the world, he sees such events as the death throes of medieval religions, rather than their rebirth. Tracing the history of religion from the thirteenth century to the present day, this book provides important context to the way we interpret global events and news stories, and will be of value to anyone who wants to engage with the cultural transformation at work in our world.

Education is currently a foremost concern for many Americans. Education, however, is about more than teaching children skills for earning a living and how to function in life. It is really a means of transmitting both a culture and a heritage. William Irwin Thompson, one of today's most innovative interdisciplinary thinkers, talks about how to transform a cultural legacy in the course of transmitting it. His visionary approach takes education far beyond the bland, watered-down curricula so many students face today in public and private schools. Thompson offers us a mind-rattling tour of our potential as human beings, from the Gilgamesh epic of 2000 B.C.E. to Disney, popular music, current politics and social crises, and beyond. He not only presents a far-reaching system of knowledge and teaching, but also suggests how we can stimulate the best and healthiest patterns of development in our children and teenagers. TRANSFORMING HISTORY will enlighten today's educators and anyone concerned with improving our legacy and our children's place in it.

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 Reichstag 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.

In this book, William Irwin Thompson explores the nature of myth. Acknowledging the persuasive power of myth to create and inform culture, he weaves the human ability to create life with and communicate through symbols with myths based on male and female forms of power.