THE LINDISFARNE ASSOCIATION: TOWARD A PLANETARY CULTURE
In 1972, William Irwin Thompson founded The Lindisfarne Association as a movement that would explore the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of the emerging planetary culture. He viewed this new formation as a culture rather than as a civilization because civilization is based on an imperial, centralized model in which the center dominates the periphery, whereas culture suggests multiple centers and the flourishing of diverse worldviews and ideologies. In his vision, it offered a middle or third way between the scientific and intellectual orientation of MIT from which spirituality was excluded and the anti-intellectualism of Findhorn and many of the spiritual communities. The Lindisfarne conferences attracted professors, artists, scientists, and scholars; similar to Black Mountain, Bennington, and Esalen, Lindisfarne was not heavily reliant on an institutional structure. It was a kind of atmosphere more than a place.
Lindisfarne was a seventh-century monastery school on an island off the northeast coast of England. For Thompson, it had a deep historical resonance, having been the center of Celtic Christianity and the base for Christian evangelism. But it lost its importance when the northern stream of esoteric Christianity deriving from Saint John was rejected by the King in favor of the southern stream based on the central authority of Rome that went back to Saint Peter. In Thompson’s view, this was the fork in the road where Christianity made the wrong turn, severing the tie with esoteric Christianity and divorcing Western religion from the techniques of inner consciousness that would enable humanity to cope with the present civilizational malaise.
Thompson expressed his vision of how the spiritual dimension could be restored in these words. “Since the esoteric has been often forcefully eliminated from Christianity, and had only survived in prophetic sects in which, unfortunately, the personality of the founder also became part of the message, I felt in the nineteen-seventies that the only way for a healthier diversity to re-establish itself was to back-propagate Christianity with living esoteric seeds from other traditions. Influenced by the Hindu-Christian syncretism of Yogananda, I thought that in a planetization of the esoteric, Yoga, Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, and native American traditions could be brought into communion with a new form of post-religious Christian spirituality and Western science.”
In the institutional domain, Thompson pointed out that both the Church and the university were narrowly politicized and so their values and worldview were similar to those of the large corporation. Thus their officials were not capable of imagining and bringing about the shift to a new planetary culture that would enable humanity to surmount the looming ecological crisis. Thompson put it this way, “Education had been captured by industry, science had been taken over by a technological idolatry based upon a narrow linear reductionism, and religion had been taken hostage by mind-numbing rituals and emotionally infantilizing forms of worship. What was needed was a new kind of educational community in which the individual was empowered through meditation to connect the unique to the universal without the mediation of clerical ritual and collectivizing worship, and in which a more holistic science that recognized complexity could work toward the design of architectural forms that were more symbiotic with our new biospheric understanding of ecology.”
Lindisfarne was to be a new type of educational community that could help plant the seeds for the planetary culture that would be based in meta-industrial villages and symbiotic cities. This movement would not attempt to restore the traditional past or recreate the pre-industrial commune; it would rather “articulate an emergent evolution to carry us forward into a new historical landscape.” The first location was Southampton, an hour outside New York City on Long Island with log cabins and a main lodge and Thompson saw the community’s true location in the creative lives of those who resided there. But after four years, Thompson was unable to pay the mortgage for the property and had to move out, wasting all the work and money the community had put into it. They moved to New York City into an abandoned Episcopal Church for which they paid only nominal rent. But they had to renovate the church, rectory, parish hall, and townhouse.
During the 1970s, alternative communities experienced turbulence due to shifting gender values as marriages broke up and new types of relationships emerged. According to Thompson, women were attracted against their better judgment to alpha male leaders, but felt angry at both the leaders and themselves for doing so, while resenting male domination. The leaders of alternative movements were still almost all male, which was the larger social problem. In the Lindisfarne community, Thompson found that the young men wanted to be the alpha males and resented his primacy as founder and fund-raiser, whereas the women were upset at the pushiness of the alpha males at the community meetings and wanted to bring forth a new feminist sisterhood. Thompson tried to be more sensitive to these issues and to have better gender balance, but even much later, he was attacked by women for falling short.
At the conferences of the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was becoming clear to participants that they were in the presence of a new worldview. John Todd’s idea that science could help reintegrate society into true partnership with nature and must be practiced in a context of sacredness or responsibility, Francisco Varela’s notion that cognition is largely shaped by aspects of the entire body, and the Gaia evolutionary theory of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis demonstrated, in Thompson’s view, “that a more human science was showing its face at Lindisfarne and that just such a science was as critical to the process of planetization as any esoteric philosophy of the past.”
Around this time, Thompson felt that they were coming closer to his ideal: “not an intentional community collectively working out the neuroses we had acquired in the family histories of our personal lives, but a cultural vessel, a grail, if you will, for a new world manifestation.” Then Maurice Strong, a rich and forward-looking real-estate developer thought that Thompson could transform Crestone, Colorado into a cultural center, so he offered him land and financial assistance for three years.
The 1979 Lindisfarne conference in Crestone on sacred architecture was so impressive that Thompson established a regular summer school for architects. With Keith Critchlow, Robert Lawlor, John Michel, and Rachel Fletcher as the founding faculty, professional architects and students poured in from different parts of the country. After the Lindisfarne Fellows House was finished in 1982, a large conference of about 100 people was held on the theme of the land and the politics of ecology. But the split in Manhattan with anti-modernists facing off against the new scientists of complex dynamical systems reemerged in Crestone. Keith Critchlow and Thompson had competing visions for the Lindisfarne Chapel, with Keith favoring a cathedral form with esoteric symbolism and Thompson a simple chapel, a space of radical emptiness with no rituals and no cultural iconography. In any case, the Chapel proved so expensive that it has still not been completed.
Financial problems besides the expense of the Chapel such as the withdrawal of support by Maurice Strong led Lindisfarne in Crestone into a period of contraction, with just one or two people living there in the winter. Thompson himself moved to Bern, Switzerland and until 1996, he organized annual Lindisfarne Fellows Conferences in Crestone and a Lindisfarne Symposium at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Looking back, Thompson regrets the failures due to lack of financial support of the educational communities in Southampton, Manhattan, and the meta-industrial village for Crestone, Colorado. These institutional reflections of the Lindisfarne Association were ephemeral, and he sees them as his generation’s anticipation of the Burning Man gatherings.
Until 1994, gatherings were held inside the Lindisfarne Fellows House at the new Crestone Mountain Zen Center. Thompsons felt that it was clear to all who attended that “Lindisfarne was embodying a noetic polity in much the same way that the artists and scientists of Paris had embodied one as they gathered in their cafés.” What people were experiencing was a new cultural shift in which identity is no longer based upon a nation or a territory but instead on a state of consciousness. It was an exhilarating and uplifting experience, as Michael Murphy, the co-founder of Esalen told Thompson. So despite his failures to establish a lasting institution, he felt that his efforts had not been in vain.
By 2000, Thompson observed, a general shift had taken place from independent institutes founded by individuals to the university and the degree-granting academic world. The educational wing of the Cultural Integration Fellowship based on Sri Aurobindo’s principles in San Francisco had already become the accredited California Institute for Integral Studies (CIIS) with graduate programs. John Todd’s New Alchemy Institute took a back seat to his professorial duties at University of Vermont. David Orr put his Meadowcreek Project to rest, and became the Dean of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, and Sim Van der Ryn downplayed the alternative Farallones Institute in favor of his architectural practice and teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
In accord with this trend, Thompson decided to teach at CIIS for three years and design a new evolution of consciousness curriculum for the Ross School in Easthampton, New York. He felt that the time for experimentation was over and that the university was absorbing the changes and innovations that accorded with its traditional mission. Together with this educational shift, fundamentalism, a new popular religious sensibility, was ascendant. So Thompson concluded that efforts “to articulate a postreligious spirituality for a new planetary culture would have to wait until fundamentalism and neoconservative capitalism had failed to deliver the Good and the goods.” He decided to donate the land and facilities of the Lindisfarne Mountain Retreat to the Crestone Mountain Zen Center, a monastery.
Why did all these projects started by visionary individuals go under? For Thompson, there is one simple answer: lack of funds. “Lindisfarne died for lack of funds every year of the twenty-five years I kept it alive by an act of will.” Recalling the past, he noted that he had become a salesman, a routine operational manager rather than creative visionary. Unfortunately, he didn’t understand how to create a product that could finance Lindisfarne’s activities.
Thompson resigned as president of the Lindisfarne Association in 1997 but organized annual conferences from 2007 to 2012. Then he recognized that after forty years and two full generations of work, the time for his particular expression of Lindisfarne’s mission to envision and implement a new planetary culture had ended. He wrote Thinking Together at the Edge of History: A Memoir of the Lindisfarne Association, 1972–2012 upon which this account is based.
