Quotes from William Irwin Thompson

If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.

The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is not enough to raise consciousness. One must lower the spirit into the earth to embody a change in things as basic as food, shelter, and livelihood.

That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.

The acid test is that all paranoids and fundamentalists lack a sense of humor, for humor is a chaos flux and flexibility, of ambiguity and multi-dimensionality, and that kind of erotic liveliness is precisely what the fundamentalist is trying to eliminate in holding rigidly to doctrine.

Fast-fame takeouts litter the information superhighway strips of the new electronic america.

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.

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.

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.

The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

Science is the storytelling of our time.

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.

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.

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.

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.