William Irwin Thompson Quotes

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Chaos Culture Evolution Reality

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

William Irwin Thompson

Player, Long, Mind

William Irwin Thompson (2015). “Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Cutlture, Second Enlarged Edition”, p.95, Andrews UK Limited

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The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.

William Irwin Thompson

Knowing, Belief

William Irwin Thompson (1990). “At the Edge of History”, p.205, SteinerBooks

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When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.

William Irwin Thompson

Frontiers, Has Beens, Edges

William Irwin Thompson (1996). “The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture”, p.8, Palgrave Macmillan

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If humans died in a healthy culture, they would not lock out the earth in metal coffins and carve their names on stone monuments, but would instead place the naked body in the earth and plant a tree above the silent heart.

William Irwin Thompson

Heart, Names, Tree

William Irwin Thompson (1978). “Darkness and Scattered Light: Four Talks on the Future”, Anchor Books

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The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.

William Irwin Thompson

Nature, Purpose, Chaos

William Irwin Thompson (1987). “Gaia, a Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology”, Inner Traditions International

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But the time has come; the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder.

William Irwin Thompson

Sleep, Reality, Darkness

William Irwin Thompson (1990). “At the Edge of History”, p.205, SteinerBooks

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Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.

William Irwin Thompson

Order, Roots, Chaos

William Irwin Thompson (1977). “Evil and world order”

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Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.

William Irwin Thompson

Distance, Moving, Environmental

William Irwin Thompson (2001). “Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution”, Lindisfarne Press

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It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as "genius" and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.

William Irwin Thompson

Genius, Movement, Patterns

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In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

William Irwin Thompson

Book, Writing, Men

William Irwin Thompson (1980). “Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture”, HarperCollins

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Science is the storytelling of our time.

William Irwin Thompson

Education, Storytelling, Our Time

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That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.

William Irwin Thompson

Islands, Sea, Knowing

William Irwin Thompson (1996). “The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture”, p.87, Palgrave Macmillan

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A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes.

William Irwin Thompson

World, Structure, Process

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The planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth.

William Irwin Thompson

Moon, Unity, Earth

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If you do not create your destiny,
you will have your fate inflicted upon you.

William Irwin Thompson

Moving On, Moving Forward, Fate

William Irwin Thompson (2001). “Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution”, Lindisfarne Press

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Some god or Weltgeist has been making a movie out of us for the past six thousand years, and now we have turned a corner on the movie set of reality and have discovered the boards propping up the two-dimensional monuments of human history. The movement of humanism has reached its limit, and now at that limit it is breaking apart into the opposites of mechanism and mysticism and moving along the circumference of a vast new sphere of posthuman thought.

William Irwin Thompson

Moving, Past, Reality

William Irwin Thompson (1980). “Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture”, HarperCollins

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One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.

William Irwin Thompson

Bifurcation, Use, Development

William Irwin Thompson (2015). “Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Cutlture, Second Enlarged Edition”, p.95, Andrews UK Limited

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I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation.

William Irwin Thompson

Pain, Thinking, Order

"Change". Booklet by Katherine Hunt, issuu.com. March 28, 2012.

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Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.

William Irwin Thompson

Change, Years, Language

William Irwin Thompson (2015). “Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Cutlture, Second Enlarged Edition”, p.95, Andrews UK Limited

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The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

William Irwin Thompson

Science, Chaos, Abstract

William Irwin Thompson (1987). “Gaia, a Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology”, Inner Traditions International

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Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.

William Irwin Thompson

World, Maps, Process

William Irwin Thompson (1987). “Gaia, a Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology”, Inner Traditions International

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Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.

William Irwin Thompson

Independent, Purpose, Conscious

William Irwin Thompson (1987). “Gaia, a Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology”, Inner Traditions International

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The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.

William Irwin Thompson

Karma, Thinking, Imagination

William Irwin Thompson (1987). “Gaia, a Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology”, Inner Traditions International

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What is at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where 'the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere'? The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different.

William Irwin Thompson

Unique, Unity, Quality

William Irwin Thompson (1990). “At the Edge of History”, SteinerBooks

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We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out.

William Irwin Thompson

Race, Growth, Generations

William Irwin Thompson (1990). “At the Edge of History”, SteinerBooks

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Born: July 16, 1938
Occupation: Critic
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