Quotations for our Times from Cultural Historian William Irwin Thompson
We are experiencing the initiation of the human race into a new level of consciousness, and that is a very terrifying experience. It does no good to turn and run from the terror of our darkness into light; we must sit it out: zazen. We must take our counsel from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and realize that these frightening projections of famines, economic disasters, ecological catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, and wars are all only the malevolent aspects of beneficent deities. If we sit and observe them, do not identify with them, but remember our Buddha-nature, we will not be dragged down by them into an incarnation of the hell they prefigure. If we run from them, we validate them; we give the projections the very psychic energy they need to overtake us. Then, as Jung has pointed out, the situation will happen outside as fate.
William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order
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The cosmic food-chain is an energy symbiosis, from the plants that feed off the sun to the devas and asuras that fed off the astral emanations of collective human thought. Just as we corral beasts to keep them in their place for our use, and as we sit on the fence and watch them ruminate all day long, we wonder how they can stand to eat all the time; so do the gods and demons corral us in history, and as they sit on the edge, they wonder how we can stand to think all day long. Within our corrals of history they come to stir up our wars and passions, so that we can be fat with the astral emanations that sustain them. Knowing that we are afraid of death, they catch us with its linked opposite, sexuality. Eros is thus the attractive jailkeeper in the prison of Thanatos.
William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth
To understand contemporary culture, you have to be willing to move beyond intellectual definitions and academic disciplines. You have to be willing to throw your net out widely and be willing to take in science, politics, and art, and science fiction, the occult, and pornography. To catch a sense of the whole in pattern recognition, you have to leap across the synapse and follow the rapid movement of informational bits. You treat in a paragraph what you know could take up a whole academic monograph, but jugglers are too restless for that: the object of the game is to grasp the object quickly, and then give it up in a flash to the brighter air.
William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order
America's esoteric destiny seems to be one of breaking down all the cultures of the world in preparation for a new global culture that will become humanity's second nature. The Muslims, whose genius was born in the Middle Ages, have a point when they call America "the Great Satan," for this second nature is so artificial, so opposite to anything that a traditional person would wish to call cultural or natural, that it appears on the horizon of the human as something inhuman, monstrous, and evil. (113)
William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature
With the death of the last male Shaker, America had lost that reverence for the profound simplicity of the craft. Everything that was cheap, shoddy, and deceitfully wrapped in "country farms" packaging rose in my mind and turned in my stomach. I could see a picture of coast-to-coast food distributors serving all the restaurants the same frozen cardboard French-fries, water-injected ham steaks, papier-mâché peas, and a carbonated water called beer. Orwell had good sense when he characterized 1984 as a time when good food was as unobtainable as sexual love.
William Irwin Thompson, The Edge of History
So there are some signs in the cultural evolution of America that, while the cold-blooded dinosaurs are tearing up the landscape, there are some tiny mammals around with warm blood in their hearts.
William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light
America's critical role in the planetization of humanity does seem to be that of the catalytic enzyme that breaks down all the traditional cultures of the world, be they Asiatic, Islamic, or European. With Disneyland in Paris and Tokyo, the United States is well on its way to dissolving all the world cultures, and I do not think any nativistic revolt of Islam will succeed in stopping it any more than Marxist-Leninism did. (79)
William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature
Art grows out of culture and is fed by culture. If art has to feed upon itself for mythology, it will die; like a stomach with nothing in it, it will soon digest itself.
William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order
I imagine a future architecture in which you turn on a building the way we now turn on the lights. These buildings will be temporary, like concerts, and not enduring like the pyramids; and so when the use of the building is finished, the people can move on. The culture will be similar to the nomadic way of life of the old Paleolithic hunters and gatherers; the people will carry their culture in their souls, and so familiar will they be with earth, wind, and stars that civilization will be unnecessary. Perhaps, rather than imagining the future, I am merely seeing the past. Perhaps even before Atlantis the hunters and gatherers of the past were not savages but initiates in cosmic mysteries. Past or future, it does not matter, for the distant future will see a return of the remote past.
William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light
Any peasant with a dumb cow can make whipped cream, but it takes a chemical factory to make Cool Whip. It is the technological process and not the natural product that is important, and if it tastes bad, well, that's beside the point, for what that point is aimed at, is the escape from nature. In America, even the food is a moon shot, a fast food rocket aimed away from the Earth.
William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature
The record of civilization is over, and like a record at its end, it keeps going on with the noise of a needle stuck in its ruts: the revolution of the workers, the protest of the young, the new creations of the avant-garde, the rise of new forms of sexual liberation, the appearance of new religions. This side of history is over, and on the other side is myth.
William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth
A university can provide you with a library, but what makes the book you are not looking for fall off the shelf into your hands to give you the material you need is not understood by any university.
William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light
Levi-Strauss has said that "myth is an act of faith in a science yet unborn," but that point of view is still too close to Frazer; it sees myth as a foreshadowing of something which will be truly known through science. You could just as well say that science is an act of faith in a mythology yet unborn, and that when we truly know the universe of which we are a part, we will see that the way DNA spirals in our cells and the way nebulae turn in space are all related to a particular dance of idea and pattern.
William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light
Home means a lot to moralists, but the mystic is society's alien and is not allowed to have a home smaller than the universe, and any time he tries to settle for less, to settle down, and to set up fences, God appears as the moving whirlwind.
William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature
We are experiencing the initiation of the human race into a new level of consciousness, and that is a very terrifying experience. It does no good to turn and run from the terror of our darkness into light; we must sit it out: zazen. We must take our counsel from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and realize that these frightening projections of famines, economic disasters, ecological catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, and wars are all only the malevolent aspects of beneficent deities. If we sit and observe them, do not identify with them, but remember our Buddha-nature, we will not be dragged down by them into an incarnation of the hell they prefigure. If we run from them, we validate them; we give the projections the very psychic energy they need to overtake us. Then, as Jung has pointed out, the situation will happen outside as fate.
William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order
There seems little chance of getting out of this century with the same human nature with which we entered it.
William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature
[The CNN Center in Atlanta is] a rendering of Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere . . . a planetary lattice of satellites in which non-stop 24-hours-a-day news gives us the experience of time under control-history under new American management.
William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature
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