Coming into being: Artifacts and texts in the evolution of consciousness

Description

In his 1996 work Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, Thompson applied an approach that was similar to his 1981 book to many other artifacts, cultures and historical periods. A notable difference, however, is that the 1996 work was influenced by the work of cultural phenomenologist Jean Gebser. Works and authors analyzed include the Enuma Elish, Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, the Book of Judges, the Rig Veda, Ramayana, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, and the Tao Te Ching. Thompson analyzed these works using the vocabulary of contemporary cognitive theory and chaos theory, as well as theories of history. An expanded paperback version was released in 1998. The phrase "Coming into being" is a translation of the Greek term gignesthai, from which the word genesis is derived. Coming Into Being Contents Foreword 1. Our Contemporary Predicament and Our Present Evolution of Consciousness 2. The Past Evolution of Consciousness: From Spirochete to Spinal Chord 3. Science and the Construction of Mythic Narratives about Human Origins 4. Weird Myths about Human Origins as Expressive of the Evolution of Consciousness from the Territorial Nation-State to Global Noetic Polities: The Strange Cases of Zecharia Sitchin and Rudolf Steiner 5. Prehistoric Sculptures: The Body as the Story of Time 6. From Prehistoric Sculpture to Folktale to Civilized Literature 7. The Hero versus the Initiate in the Masculine Encounter with Death: A Comparison of Osiris and Gilgamesh 8. The Patriarchal Construction of Culture and the Reimagination of the Female Body: A Comparison of the Enuma Elish andthe Rig Veda 9. The Shift from the Arithmetic to the Geometric Mentality: Another Look at the Biblical Story of Samson and Delilah 10. The Alhance of the Animal and the Human in the Expulsion of the Demonic from the Physical World: A Consideration of the Ramayana 11. The Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita: The Emergence and Articulation of the Higher Self 12. The Road Not Taken: Chaos Dynamics and the Cosmic Feminine in the Tao Te Ching Notes Index About the Author