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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
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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
Body
Died
Metal
Humans
Healthy
Locks
Heart
Instead
Metals
Would
Tree
Stone
Monuments
Names
Naked
Carve
Culture
Plant
Coffins
Place
Stones
Lock
Earth
Silent
Monument
More quotes by William Irwin Thompson
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
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
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
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
Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.
William Irwin Thompson
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
The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
William Irwin Thompson
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.
William Irwin Thompson
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
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
The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
William Irwin Thompson
Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
William Irwin Thompson
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
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
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
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
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
Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.
William Irwin Thompson
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
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
