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(" but perhaps Apocalypse will take care of mechanistic positivism") , the
" ruling leftist intellectuals in the universities," the " modern technocratic
liberal, " who is distinguishable from the "paranoid Eastern Liberal ," that
denizen of the New Babylon , "the New York of Normans Mailer and
Podhoretz ." In the mystic California of the future there will be no room for
" the clever ironies and sophistications of the New York intelligentsia ." The
ground of Thompson 's hatred for New York , I take it, is that relative to
California, New York is the Reality Principle, the "dead center of the
present ."
Miles away in mental space from that wicked and moribund center are
"those living places where the culture of man is not cutting violently against
the grain of the universe ," places like Auroville (India) , Findhorn (Ireland) ,
Arcosanti (Arizona) , and of course, Lindisfarne (Long Island) , points of light
in the gathering darkness , vantages from which the saving remnant can watch
the unrighteous go up in smoke to become perfume in the nostrils of the
unrighteous (to paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas) . The righteous are like heirs
watching impatiently while their patriarch writhes in a final convulsion, the
answer to their dreams of inheriting the earth. " The primary fantasy of our
time is to escape catastrophe by building an ark or founding an apocalyptic
colony far removed from the collapse of civilization," says Thompson , and he
leaves us no doubt as to who is Noah or where is the ark (' 'The Lindisfarne
Association is designed to be a vehicle of the new planetary Renaissance ' ') or
who , after the deluge , will be in charge : "Those who have effected the shift to
cosmic consciousness will probably serve as future versions of the Athenian
elect who were initiate to the mysteries."
To someone who hasn 't been able to bring off that shift, Thompson's
cosmic consciousness begins to look like another case of the omnipotence of
thought. When thought becomes omnipotent, matter loses its brute intransi–
gence ; it becomes merely "a condensation of consciousness ," spirit grown
cold. Heated up again , consciousness seeps into nature , curdles it , pulls it in ,
digests it, makes it one's own substance. " Consciousness is a moving form
that evolves toward maximum organization and improbability , and it feeds
upon the physical systems that move toward maximum molecular disorgani–
zation and probability ." Cosmic consciousness' 'feeds" not only on nature,
but on culture; it is an antidote to alienation and a substitute for politics:
"The way to effect the most profound cultural transformation is not to
expend one 's energies in attacking institutions or industrial society as a whole ,
but to surround society with a new field of consciousness." Consciousness is
not the superstructure , not the product of what we do, but its cause- ' 'it is
not the case that consciousness is created out of behavior; behavior is a
construct built up out ofconsciousness ." It is not time-bound , the function of
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