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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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William Irwin Thompson
Age: 82 †
Born: 1938
Born: July 16
Died: 2020
Died: November 8
Critic
Historian
Mythographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
History
Increasingly
Culture
Cultures
Past
Description
Live
Performance
Work
Performances
Taking
Teacher
Simply
Ideally

More quotes by 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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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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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 future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.
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.
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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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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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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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.
William Irwin Thompson
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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.
William Irwin Thompson
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That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
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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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
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Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.
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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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
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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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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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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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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