Lindisfarne is an association of creative individuals in the arts, sciences, and contemplative practices devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture. Planetary culture is not internationalism--which is the economic structure of relations of nation-states through commerce and war--but rather a new vision of complex dynamical systems and planetary dynamics based upon the Gaian insights of our Lindisfarne Fellows James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, and their further development in the Living Machines of ecologist John Todd and the Green Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn and David Orr. A Gaia Politique has been articulated by Hazel Henderson in her book Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishers, 2006, and by William Irwin Thompson in Gaia, A Way of Knowing (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 1987) and Gaia Two: Emergence, the New Science of Becoming (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 1991). Within the body of scientific and artistic works of all the Lindisfarne Fellows there is a shared recognition that the industrial as well as the preindustrial images of nature, self, and society no longer serve as adequate descriptions of our contemporary cultural reality and that the imagination is now being challenged to re-envision, re-think, and re-create the delicate balance of life that is poised between the nature of the past and the culture of the future.
As an association of artists, scholars, scientists, and contemplatives from many different sacred traditions, Lindisfarne works through its Fellowship toward the following goals:
I. The realization of the inner harmony of all the great universal religions and the spiritual traditions of the tribal peoples of the world.
II. The planetization of the esoteric paths of enlightenment that have often been hidden and obscured by medieval and archaic cultural formations and their rearticulation in the light of contemporary art and science.
III. The fostering of a new and healthier balance between nature and culture through the research and development of appropriate technologies, architectural settlements, and compassionate economies for meta-industrial villages and convivial cities.
IV. The illumination of the spiritual foundations of political governance through scholarship and artistic communications that foster a global ecology of consciousness beyond the present ideological systems of warring industrial nation-states, outraged traditional societies, and ravaged lands and seas.
Arthur Zajonc
Wes Jackson & Rebecca Todd
David Orr
History of the Lindisfarne Association
The Lindisfarne Association was founded by the American writer William Irwin Thompson in New York City in December of 1972. Inspired in 1967 by Michael Murphy's work in bringing Eastern philosophy and Western psychology together in the establishment of Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Professor Thompson returned to his teaching position at M.I.T. and sought for new ways to broaden the humanities by exploring the mystical roots of Western science and by bringing meditation into the thinking of philosophy and the practice of science and art. During this period of the war in Viet Nam, M.I.T., however, was more interested in extending its approach in engineering into the behavioral sciences and the postindustrial management of natural resources and preindustrial cultures. Professor Thompson resigned from the Institute, moved to Canada, and began to work on new ways of teaching the humanities at the newly created York University in Toronto. At the Couchiching Conference in Ontario in 1969, Thompson met Ivan Illich and was deeply impressed by his vision of challenging the dominance of the university through the establishment of "the counterfoil institution." From 1970 to 1972, Thompson traveled around the world in search of models of counterfoil institutions that could provide alternatives to the bureaucratic postindustrial university: centers such as Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti in Arizona, Sri Aurobindo and Mira Richard's ("the Mother") Auroville in India, C.F. von Weizsaeker's Research Foundation for Eastern Wisdom and Western Science in Starnberg, Germany, and the Findhorn Community in Scotland.
At the instigation of Gene Fairly, Lindisfarne was established in New York, rather than Toronto, and Emily Sellon, the editor of New York's Main Currents in Modern Thought, served with Thompson and Fairly as the founding Board of Directors of the Lindisfarne Association. Through the efforts of Nancy Wilson Ross, author of Three Ways of Asian Wisdom and a former student of the Bauhaus in Germany, Thompson's writings and lectures were brought to the attention of Laurance S. Rockefeller and Sydney and Jean Lanier, and they assisted in the establishment of a facility on Long Island in 1973. With the encouragement of Nancy Wilson Ross and Dean James P. Morton, Lindisfarne began its activities in a working relationship with the Zen Center in San Francisco and the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and this helped Lindisfarne's work to be ecumenical and national from the start.
Although Dean Morton offered to house the educational program of Lindisfarne at the Cathedral from the very beginning of activities in 1973, Dr. Thompson felt that a more contemplative and communal mode of study and reflection was needed to differentiate Lindisfarne from the church and the university, so Lindisfarne was established in a rural setting on Long Island. From 1973 to 1977, a resident staff lived communally on a thirteen acre facility at Fishcove in the township of Southampton, but provided an educational program for the Greater New York area through seminars, residential courses, and summer conferences. Many of the pioneers of "the alternative movement," well-known thinkers such as Gregory Bateson and E. F. Schumacher became Lindisfarne Fellows or Scholars-in-Residence and helped through their presence and publications to outline the shape of the new ecological consciousness. Lindisfarne 's scholarship from this period is, perhaps, best summed up in the book Earth's Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences. (New York, Harper & Row, 1977).
From 1976 to 1979, Lindisfarne maintained a teaching center in Manhattan in an Episcopal landmark church at Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street. Here the work of the Association became the operation of an urban educational institute with Scholars-in- Residence, evening classes, public lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and poetry readings. Lindisfarne-in-Manhattan was more of an intellectual mind jazz club, a headier version of the Village Vanguard in which Grotowski riffed on theatre, Robert Bly read his Rumi translations, and Gary Snyder and Paul Winter did poetry and Jazz on Snyder's Pulitzer Prize winning Turtle Island. Thanks to Paul Winter, Lindisfarne had an American bald eagle as artist-in-residence while the two of them were performing Common Ground uptown at Carnegie Hall.
The scholarship from this period is still available in the books based on live talks given at Lindisfarne: works such as Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature, Francisco Varela's Principles of Biological Autonomy, Keith Critchlow's Islamic Patterns, Kathleen Raine's The Human Face of God: Blake's Book of Job, John Michell's Megalithomania, Warren Kenton's The Kabbalistic Tradition, John and Nancy Todd's Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address, and William Irwin Thompson's Darkness and Scattered Light and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. In addition to this program of lectures by Scholars-in-Residence, Lindisfarne sponsored a program in the arts in which Jerzy Grotowski from Poland discussed his work in metatheatre, and Andre Gregory explored patterns of consciousness with the quantum physicist David Finkelstein and presented the material that became his film, My Dinner with Andre. Hilary Harris presented cinematic visions of the city of New York as organism, footage that has since become well known in Godfrey Reggio's film, Koyanisquaatsi. Paul Winter began the series of solstice and equinox concerts that still continues at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the Harmonic Choir presented some of the very first of their recitals of Hoomi singing. Wendell Berry, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Menashe, Kathleen Raine, and Gary Snyder gave poetry readings; however, in spite of this non-stop three year concert of ideas, visions, performances, and classes, the cost of maintaining four buildings in downtown Manhattan was too great for an alternative institution to bear. During the period of economic recession and "stagflation," all of Lindisfarne's applications to New York foundations for $250,000 to restore the historical Landmark Church and continue its educational program were declined. In a fitting expression of the new culture of New York in the eighties, the Church was later transformed, with an expenditure of over two and a half million dollars, into a fashionable, punk, sacrilegious discotheque in which the gliteratti gyrated on the altar of "Limelight" and stretch limos lined the littered streets that the members of Lindisfarne used to sweep after evening meditation. "Reversal is the movement of the Tao," say the old Chinese sages, and so the culture of the materialistic eighties was the reversal of the spiritual seventies. So for the eighties and nineties, Lindisfarne presented its programs at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine under the sponsorship of "the Green Dean," Rev. James Morton.
Lindisfarne returned the Church and its facility in Southampton to the holders of leases and mortgages and the residential staff of eighteen people broke up into three groups, one moving to Massachusetts to set up the Lindisfarne Press, the second going off to Colorado to establish a solar village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Crestone, and the third joining the contemplative community of Zen Center in San Francisco. To continue the work of the conferences, Lindisfarne donated the small building fund it had been able to raise to Zen Center so that it could begin a fund-raising campaign to build a guest house to complete its Wheelwright Conference Center. This facility was completed and is now called the Lindisfarne Guest House and is dedicated to the memory of Gregory Bateson, who died at Zen Center on July 4, 1980.
With the establishment of the Crestone Mountain Zen Center by Lindisfarne in 1988, Lindisfarne's focus returned to its teaching program at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York (1988-1996) and annual conferences with the Lindisfarne Fellows at different locations in the United States and Europe. From 1985 to 1988, Lindisfarne directed a Program for Biology, Cognition, and Ethics at the Cathedral that explored the political and cultural implications of the Gaia Hypothesis and the implications of Buddhist psychology and meditational practice for European phenomenology and American cognitive science. This program was focused at CREA at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and on the research and writings of Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela. Through the efforts of William Irwin Thompson and Francisco Varela, several conferences were held in the United States and Europe. The publications resulting from this Program are:
Gaia, A Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology, Ed. William Thompson (Lindisfarne Press, Great Barrington, Mass., 1987).
Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science, William Irwin Thompson (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1989).
Gaia Two, Emergence: The New Science of Becoming Ed. William Irwin Thompson, (Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, New York, 1991).
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
The American Replacement of Nature, William Irwin Thompson (Doubleday/Currency Books, New York, 1991).
Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception, Evan Thompson, Routledge, London, 1995.
Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, William Irwin Thompson, (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1996 & 1998).
Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, Evan Thompson (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007).
The role of Lindisfarne was to initiate an impulse in culture but not to try to own or institutionalize it. For example, Lindisfarne established a contemplative retreat with meditation and classes in hatha yoga, Tai Chi Chuan, and philosophy in the Hamptons in 1973. (People thought we were quite weird at the time.) In Manhattan from 1976-1979, Lindisfarne set up a program on Buddhism and Cognitive Science with lectures by Nechung rinpoche, Robert Thurman, and Francisco Varela. When New Age retreats began to become commercially themed hotels, Lindisfarne shifted away from being a retreat center to set up a School for Sacred Architecture in Crestone in 1980. When programs on sacred architecture became sponsored by the Prince of Wales, and when a program on Buddhism and cognitive science became sponsored by the Dalai Lama, there was no reason any longer to continue Lindisfarne's two programs in these areas, so it moved to less public horizons of culture in subjects such as a Gaia Politique, interdisciplinary approaches to complex dynamical systems, and artistic explorations of Wissenskunst. Now that the approaches to cultural transformation that Lindisfarne helped to initiate are fully implanted in American culture, Lindisfarne continues to encourage the emergence of a new planetary culture by bringing the Fellows together once a year and contributing to the encouragement of the founding of new efforts and institutions, but the Association itself is fading away with the generation that initiated it.
Lindisfarne Fellows House
Lindisfarne Chapel
Evan Thompson & H. H. the Dalai Lama
The Lindisfarne Fellows
Wendell Berry
Joan Halifax-Roshi
Jane Hirshfield
The Lindisfarne Fellows is an international honorary society of individuals who, in the judgment of the Founder and Fellows, have made outstanding contributions to the expression of the new planetary culture. The Fellows come from all faiths, theistic and atheistic, and all professions; although they may share a common ethos, they do not share a common ideology.
The Fellows meet once a year in a conference designed to explore issues of contemporary concern. A candidate for the Fellowship is nominated by one of the Fellows and
then the nomination is considered at their annual meeting.
The Roster of the Fellows for 2008 :
Ralph Abraham, Director, Visual Mathematics Institute, Santa Cruz, California.
David Abram, Eco-Philosopher and Author, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Brian Arthur, Economist, Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico.
Christopher Bamford, Author and Publisher, Great Barrington, MA.
Lois Cammack Bateson, Psychotherapist, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Mary Catherine Bateson, Prof. of Anthropology George Mason Univ., Fairfax, Virginia.
Wendell Berry, Poet and Farmer, Port Royal, Kentucky.
Stewart Brand, Author and Publisher, Sausalito, California.
Santiago Calatrava, Architect, New York and Zurich.
Richard Falk, Emeritus Prof. of International Law, Princeton Univ., New Jersey.
David Finkelstein, Physicist, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia.
Joan Halifax-roshi, Anthropologist and Abbess, Upaya Zen Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Hazel Henderson, Author & Economist, St. Augustine, Florida.
