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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

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William Irwin Thompson
Age: 82 †
Born: 1938
Born: July 16
Died: 2020
Died: November 8
Critic
Historian
Mythographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Development
Emergence
Food
Branch
Lines
Marks
Use
Branches
Place
Begins
Thought
Road
Bifurcation
Find
Mark
Fork
Way
Line
Forks

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The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.
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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.
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Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
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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.
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Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.
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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.
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If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
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In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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