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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

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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
Systems
Abstract
Chaos
Control
Science
Engendered
Holds

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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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The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.
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Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.
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Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
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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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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
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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.
William Irwin Thompson
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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
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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.
William Irwin Thompson
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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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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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If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
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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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In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.
William Irwin Thompson
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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
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The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
William Irwin Thompson
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Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.
William Irwin Thompson
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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.
William Irwin Thompson
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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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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