William Irwin Thompson Quotes

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

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

The acid test is that all paranoids and fundamentalists lack a sense of humor, for humor is a chaos flux and flexibility, of ambiguity and multi-dimensionality, and that kind of erotic liveliness is precisely what the fundamentalist is trying to eliminate in holding rigidly to doctrine.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the old world view; as a lunatic or alienated artist, his own neurotic traits can become magnified as they tremble with the new energy pouring in from the universal source.

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.

Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

Science is the storytelling of our time.

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.

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.

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.

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

Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.

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.

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

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.

Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.

The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.

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.

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.

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.