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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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William Irwin Thompson
Age: 82 †
Born: 1938
Born: July 16
Died: 2020
Died: November 8
Critic
Historian
Mythographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Human
Cultural
Humans
Transformation
First
Global
Enough
Evolution
Long
Player
Mind
Individual
Constituent
Time
Culture
Constituents
Life
Firsts
Swift

More quotes by William Irwin Thompson

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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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The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
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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.
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Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.
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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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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
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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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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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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.
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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
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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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Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
William Irwin Thompson
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The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.
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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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
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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.
William Irwin Thompson
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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
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If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
William Irwin Thompson
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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.
William Irwin Thompson
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Science is the storytelling of our time.
William Irwin Thompson