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 More Quotes by William Irwin Thompson More Quotes From 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 playermindlong 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 nameshearttree 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 chaosrootsorder 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 darknesssleepreality 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 environmentaldistancemoving 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 bifurcationdevelopmentuse Science is the storytelling of our time. William Irwin Thompson our-timestorytellingeducation The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief. William Irwin Thompson knowingbelief 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 unitymoonearth Some god or Weltgeist has been making a movie out of us for the past six thousand years, and now we have turned a corner on the movie set of reality and have discovered the boards propping up the two-dimensional monuments of human history. The movement of humanism has reached its limit, and now at that limit it is breaking apart into the opposites of mechanism and mysticism and moving along the circumference of a vast new sphere of posthuman thought. William Irwin Thompson realitypastmoving 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 writingmenbook If you do not create your destiny, William Irwin Thompson moving-onfatemoving-forward 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 patternsmovementgenius 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 painorderthinking The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered. William Irwin Thompson chaosabstractscience The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos. William Irwin Thompson chaosnaturepurpose Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose. William Irwin Thompson independentconsciouspurpose Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World. William Irwin Thompson mapsprocessworld 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 structureprocessworld 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 languagechangeyears
