Lindisfarne Association

The Lindisfarne Association is a group of intellectuals of diverse interests organized by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson for the "study and realization of a new planetary culture". It is inspired by Jean Gebser's idea of the integral structure of consciousness, and by Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the noosphere. In his book Reimagination of the World, Thompson described his reasons for naming his group after Lindisfarne, an island with a famous monastery (once inhabited by Saint Cuthbert) just off the coast of Northumberland in the North East of England:

"Although I used the word as a symbol of a small group of people effecting a transformation from one system to another, the word also brought with it the archetypical associations of a small group of monks holding onto ancient knowledge in a fallen world, a world that would soon overrun them during the Viking terror."