Gaia 2: Emergence : the New Science of Becoming

William Irwin Thompson, Ph.D. (1938- 2020), was born in Chicago and grew up in Los Angeles. A poet and cultural philosopher, received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship to do his doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He received his doctorate from Cornell in 1966 and published his first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 in 1967. Thompson taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. His interdisciplinary interests were indicated in that he studied anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and cultural history at Cornell. He also served as visiting professor of religion at Syracuse University (1973), visiting professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto (1984), visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York each autumn of 1992 to 1996. In 1995, he designed an Evolution of Consciousness Curriculum for the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, and served as a Founding Mentor. His best known works include At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (1971); The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture (1981); and Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (1996). He was a founder and president of the Lindisfarne Association, a group of creative individuals in the arts, sciences, and contemplative practices devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture, and the seed for Lindisfarne Books. William Irwin Thompson lived his retired years in Portland, Maine.