Weird things do happen when systems complexify beyond a certain level, and emergent behaviors seem extremely organized and intelligent and goal-seeking.
What prevents you from knowing yourself as all and beyond all, is the mind based on memory. It has power over you as long as you trust it; don’t struggle with it; just disregard it. Deprived of attention, it will slow down and reveal the mechanism of its working. Once you know its nature and purpose, you will not allow it to create imaginary problems.
Preaching religion—telling people that they ought to behave this way and they ought to behave that, that they should have faith, that they should love one another—produces nothing but hypocrisy.
By virtue of the emergence of Thought a special and novel environment has been evolved among human individuals within which they acquire the faculty of associating together, and reacting upon one another, no longer primarily for the preservation and continuation of the species but for the creation of a common consciousness.
We don’t figure out in words or in ordered thoughts how we grow our own bodies, how we structure our bones, how we regulate our metabolism. And we don’t really even know how we manage to be conscious, how we actually think, and how we actually make decisions. We do these things, indeed, but the processes of the order of the physical body which underlie them are completely mysterious to us.
Quite suddenly I feel my understanding dawning into a colossal clarity, as if everything were opening up down to the roots of my being and of time and space themselves. The sense of the world becomes totally obvious. I am struck with amazement that I or anyone could have thought life a problem or being a mystery.
It’s important, then, to understand that to some extent this is a hoax: that we believe that the future is what we’re responsible for and what we’re supposed to live for, and that we say of a thing which we don’t think is any good “it has no future.” Now, when you contrast that—which is absolute common sense to most people living in the Western world; it’s the future we’ve got to work for—contrast that with the Indian Hindu/Buddhist idea of time, wherein which they feel that in the course of time everything falls apart, and that therefore there is nothing to be hoped for from the future.
Wisdom does not attain completeness except through the living of life; and discipline divorced from wisdom is not true discipline, but merely the meaningless following of custom, which is only a disguise for stupidity.
Most people need a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on their own initiative and must be under their own direction and control. Yet most people do not have to exert this initiative, direction, and control as single individuals. It is usually enough to act as a member of a small group. Thus if half a dozen people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be served. But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no room for autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power process will not be served. The same is true when decisions are made on a collective basis if the group making the collective decision is so large that the role of each individual is insignificant.
Always and everywhere, it is the universe that holds all things together and is the primary activating power in every activity.
If humanity sets itself some goals which are incompatible with further integration of individuals, the result will be an evolutionary dead end.
Just at this moment of the development of technology—when we suddenly see it’s a lot more complicated than we thought it was, and that our project to change the universe is not going to be as easy as even H. G. Wells imagined—it’s just at this moment that this Chinese wisdom becomes available to the West. And we can understand it because it’s now talking our language. It’s talking of the language of relativity. The whole Zhuangzi book starts out with an absolutely marvelous chapter on relativity: relativity of the opposites, the interdependence, the mutual interpenetration of everything that happens. And we’ve discovered it.
If the person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life, and insists on a certain program, you’re going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off-center; he has aligned himself with a programmatic life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. And the world’s full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.
It should by now be clear to anyone that the energy crisis is but a misnomer for that explosion of greed hidden within the consumerist proposition. Tone down consumerism and greed (human diaspora) and the energy crisis fades away. Stay with consumerism-sprawl and the energy crisis will starve our world population.
Importance is often attached to the fact that modern digital computers are electrical, and that the nervous system also is electrical. Since Babbage’s machine was not electrical, and since all digital computers are in a sense equivalent, we see that this use of electricity cannot be of theoretical importance. Of course electricity usually comes in where fast signalling is concerned, so that it is not surprising that we find it in both these connections. In the nervous system chemical phenomena are at least as important as electrical. In certain computers the storage system is mainly acoustic. The feature of using electricity is thus seen to be only a very superficial similarity. If we wish to find such similarities we should look rather for mathematical analogies of function.
We need no more powerful tools than what we have inherited from these shamanic cultures. It’s a question, pure and simple, of courage, of having the guts to use it, of surrender. And of course it had to be that, because surrender requires the abandonment of the ego. And it is the ego’s house of cards that is entirely at risk if we begin to look more deeply at the psychedelic experience.
Cosmic Consciousness is a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man.
In the past, a partial and inadequate view of human purpose has been relatively innocuous only because it has been accompanied by technical limitations. This is only one of the many places where human impotence has shielded us from the full destructive impact of human folly.
Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena.
In all probability, throughout this galaxy, and throughout other galaxies, there are human or comparable populations that arise and go, arise and go, just as we do individually. So don’t get too worried about the thought that this whole human system on this planet may go away and disappear. Because if you get too worried about it, it’s going to happen faster than if you don’t worry about it.
The most significant, and the truly specific, movement of the cosmic system in which we are caught up, is not the formation of galaxies and stars; it is much more the genesis of large molecules, followed by that of cells and then by that of the higher living beings. In other words, the most exact definition for our intelligence of the nature of the universe is the process of ‘auto-arrangement’. It is in virtue of this latter that, in the course of a drift which affects the totality of space and time, ‘matter’ passes, locally and partially (though at the same time in an over-all operation) from more simple and less conscious states to states that are both physico-chemically more complex and psychically more interiorized.
Love is the most universal, the most tremendous, and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.
And then the curious thing that occurs is: the moment all that is dropped, suddenly, it dawns on you that—to be important—existence does not have to go on any longer than a moment. Quantitative continuity is of no value.
I think what we have to do is begin, then, to design this process. It is now moving fast enough that it is within the ken of each one of us to see progressive consolidation of change taking place in the world around us. We, as human beings, I think, are destined to be the design and control element in this thing; in this global Gaian process. Never mind that we have done it so badly up to now, because now—meaning the twentieth century—is a completely different kind of epistemic world than any world that preceded it. And to the degree that we can shed the inherited behavior patterns of previous centuries, previous cultural styles, and actually take hold of the tools present at hand, we can guide and control this evolutionary process.