Suggested Reading List
for the Idea of "The Evolution of Consciousness"
by William Irwin Thompson

Introduction

Science and scholarship reflect the historical periods in which they are put forth. In the middle of the Second World War, when our whole industrial civilization was being transformed by global means of construction and destruction, scholars such as Jean Gebser and Teilhard de Chardin began to use new terms such as "the history of the awakening of consciousness" and "the planetization of mankind." One can trace the roots of this historicizing of the nature of mind back to Hegel's reactions to Kant, or, perhaps, even farther back to Vico. Suffice it to say that the narrative of the evolution of consciousness is not simply intellectual history -- a list of achievements -- or social and political history -- a list of events and emergent institutions. One could easily take a year-long university course on this topic, but, obviously, the faculty does not have the time to do this. So in recognition of this fact of life, I am responding to the request for a very brief reading list, with a suggested list, from which the faculty member may choose the texts that seem to be of immediate use.

The List

Owen Barfield,
Saving the Appearances.
Barfield was part of "The Inklings" in England, a literary group which included C.S.Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien. Their response to the crisis of the two world wars was a Christian reaffirmation. Barfield was more esoteric than Lewis and was profoundly impressed and influenced by the writings of the Austrian religious philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Prof. David Lavery maintains a web site devoted to the work of Owen Barfield.
Jean Gebser,
Everpresent Origin: A Contribution to the History of the Awakening of Consciousness (Ohio University Press, 1984).

Gebser is not as well known in America, although he is the inspiration for much of the work of the New Age transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber. Gebser is more artistic than Wilber, and less of an obsessive-compulsive mapper. Gebser was a friend of Lorca and Picasso and he constructed his narrative by looking out at the world from within the insides of great works of art.

My approach is much closer to Gebser's than Wilber's. For people who feel an attraction to Wilber's work, and, indeed, he is quite popular, especially in California, then Up from Eden is the place to start. This book covers much of the same territory as my own The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture. My approach is much more literary and artistic than Ken's, and so it is closer to the spirit of Gebser's work, from which I would recommend Part One of Everpresent Origin, as Part Two, the section on the contemporary world, is not as strong as Part One -- his thoughts on the unfolding of consciousness in history

Erich Neumann,
The History and Origins of Consciousness (Princeton University Press, 1970).
This is a rich and fascinating work that comes out of the Analytical Psychology movement of C.G. Jung.
Merlin Donald
Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognitition.
Donald is a Professor of Psychology at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario; his approach is more scientific than Jungian and owes much to the specific field of cognitive psychology.
A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001)
NEW. Some comments maybe later.
William Irwin Thompson
Now, as for my own work. I come out of an anthropological approach, and my first undergraduate publications were influenced by Gregory Bateson's early formulation of dynamical systems in Naven, and Robert Redfield's The Primitive World and its Transformations. To understand the Fifth Grade at Ross, one really needs to read The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. (And indeed, Barbara Raeder-Tracy has, and has applied this material to her discussions of Sumerian poetry and the Gilgamesh Epic.) For teachers in the sixth grade, Chapters 9 through 14, of Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, I hope, will be helpful. For teachers in the high school, Chapter Four, "A Cultural History of Consciousness" from my book Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science is a brief presentation of the consciousness approach.
Revised 10 Nov 2000 by Ralph Herman Abraham