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gods ," details ofwhich he discovered in visions and in the thought ofTeilhard
de Chardin , Carl Jung , V.A. Ambartsumyan, Edgar Cayce, C.F. von
Weizsacher, Erick von Diniken , David Spangler, Paolo Soleri , Aurelio
Peccei , Marshall McLuhan , Pythagoras, Sri Aurobindo, Gopi Krishna,
Paramahansa Yoganda , Doris Lessing, Stanley Kubrick , Ivan Iliich, Arthur C.
Clarke, C.S . Lewis , H .G. Wells , Immanuel Velikovsky, and Plato . The
advance guard of the new planetary culture has already established bases all
over the world, in associations and institutes where people pray over plants or
speak to elves , or practice the Yogas , Tantra, Hatha, and Kriya , where they
seek to unlock the mysteries of ESP, Kirlian photography , etheric energy,
psychic healing, psychokinesis, astral projection, Atlantis, and "the cities
hidden in the other dimensions of the Bermuda Triangle ."
" The vast new sphere of posthuman thought " revealed in these associa–
tions , those thinkers , and his own visions turns out to be no more than the
pneumatic corpus of Madame Blavatsky unveiled in a setting of California
Moderne . (, 'What Los Angeles is experiencing is the future for all of us, " says
Thompson , who expects to be at home in the future : "California is my home,
even if! must live away from it . ' ') If
you
take' 'all the variants of this planetary
mythology" that Thompson sees everywhere, and then "sort out the infor–
mation from the noise ,"
you
come up with ' 'four propositions of a new world
view"
1.
There is intelligent life in the universe beyond earth.
2. The meeting we are expecting in front of us in linear time has already
occurred , is now occurring , and will continue to occur. The gods do
not talk
to
us, they play
through
us
with
our history .
3. There is more to our history than the meager record of six thousand
years. Our religious myths are the detritus of the lost history of earth.
4. Our subjective -objective distinctions about reality are incorrect. As in
the world view of the Hopi Indians, Matter, Energy, and Conscious–
ness form a continuum .
There a number of things worth noticing about this new world view,
outside of the fact that it is not new. For one thing , it depends (psychologi–
cally, if not logically) on the thrilling idea that " some kind of violent
apocalypse " is imminent . But only for the bad guys, the impresarios of things
as they are . " For those who lock all their psychic energy into dying forms and
rigidly resist the pulse of life , there is only death and the denial of death in
greed. For those who cannot let go , apocalypse comes to deliver them
violently. " Prominent among those who resist the pulse of life are positivists
