Daily Inspiration Quote by William Irwin Thompson

Thompson draws a hard, almost accusatory line: what we do with awareness becomes story, image, possibility; what we do without awareness hardens into pattern. The first clause flatters modern self-understanding. Consciousness doesn’t just think, it “reflects” itself in imagination, as if the mind’s self-portrait is drawn in metaphors, art, and futures we can revise. Then he pivots to a darker diagnosis of how lives get lived: the unconscious doesn’t merely influence behavior, it is “expressed as karma,” a term he repurposes less as mystical bookkeeping than as momentum. Karma here is the habit-energy of a person, culture, or institution running on scripts it no longer recognizes as scripts.

The bite is in the phrasing “generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.” Divorced and alienated are political words smuggled into psychology; they echo Marx as much as Jung. Thompson implies the modern subject is capable of producing an endless stream of doing - work, consumption, outrage, even “self-improvement” - that has lost contact with both reflection (thinking) and intimacy (feeling). That’s karma as automation: consequences accruing not because the universe is judging you, but because you keep pressing “play” on the same internal program.

Contextually, Thompson’s whole project braided systems theory, spirituality, and cultural criticism against late-20th-century technocracy. This line reads like a warning about societies that prize output over insight: when imagination shrinks, the unconscious doesn’t disappear. It simply takes the wheel.