William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompsonis known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He is the founder of the Lindisfarne Association...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth16 July 1938
CountryUnited States of America
player long mind
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.
genius movement patterns
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.
heart names tree
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.
years language evolution
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.
sleep reality darkness
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.
moving past reality
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.
karma thinking imagination
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.
sea knowing islands
That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
moving-on fate destiny
If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
maps world process
Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.
purpose chaos conscious
The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
independent purpose conscious
Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.
imagination domain feels
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.
chaos abstract
The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.