Thompson, William Irwin (1938-)

Author of books analyzing society in the light of contemporary New Age movements and founder of Lindisfarne Association, a commune based on a "new planetary culture." Thompson was born on July 16, 1938, in Chicago, Illinois. He was educated at Pomona College (B.A., 1962) and Cornell University (M.A., 1964, Ph.D., 1966). He became an assistant professor of humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for several years (1965-68). Afterward, he joined the faculty at York University, Toronto, in 1968 and remained there for many years.

In the 1970s, Thompson began to explore the possibility of a new culture emerging in the light of occult, spiritual, and new consciousness movements. In Passages About Earth (1974), he analyzed the alternative cultures of Paolo Soleri, H. G. Wells, Werner Heisenberg, Aurelio Peccei and his Club of Rome, the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the Institute for World Order and W. Warren Wagar, C. F. von Weizäcker of the Max Planck Institute, and the Kundalini yogi Pandit Gopi Krishna. The book contains observation into the nature and impact of various New Age movements and lifestyles of the established technological nation-states.

Thompson was most favorably impressed by the alternative culture of Findhorn Foundation, the pioneering Scottish New Age community established by Peter and Eileen Caddy in 1962 as "a training center for the embodiment of universal consciousness in those who recognize their path is one of world service." He also visited the ruins of Lindisfarne, a monastery on Holy Island off the coast of Northumberland, England; it was founded by St. Aidan in 635 C.E. Later, Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association in Southampton, New York, as an educational community for cultural transformation in a new synthesis.

In Thompson's view, the original Lindisfarne typified a historic clash between esoteric Christianity and ecclesiastical Christianity—between religious experience and religious authority. As with Eileen Caddy's experiments at Findhorn, Thompson's Lindisfarne has great significance as an attempt to extend intellectual theories by practical community work. In such a setting, occultism and higher consciousness movements are integrated into a truly New Age "planetary culture" rather than a counterculture.

Sources:

Thompson, William Irwin. At the Edge of History. New York: Harper, 1971.

——. Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

——. Evil and World Order. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

——. Gaia 2: Emergence: The New Science of Becoming. Hudson, N. Y.: Lindisfarne Press, 1991.

——. Islands Out of Times. Garden City, N.Y.: Dial Press, 1985.

——. Passages About Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.