William Irwin Thompson Quotes
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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.
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If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
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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.
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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.
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What is at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where 'the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere'? The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different.
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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.
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The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
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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.