Quote

Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.

William Irwin Thompson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Irwin Thompson
Age: 82 †
Born: 1938
Born: July 16
Died: 2020
Died: November 8
Critic
Historian
Mythographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Conscious
Purpose
Emerge
Unconscious
Independent

More quotes by William Irwin Thompson

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
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
Image
Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
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
Image
The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
Science is the storytelling of our time.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
William Irwin Thompson
Image
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