All these people who hang around ashrams and all that stuff, if you want that—if you want to leave everything behind, if you want to become incomprehensible to everyone who ever loved you, if you want to rise up into that imperium up on cold mountain—there’s nothin’ holding you back. It’s there to be done. People think the spiritual quest is a chore and a journey. It is till you get to this stuff. Then it’s all about putting your foot on the brakes, slowing everything down, holding it back. You have found the answer. Now the question is: how the hell do you face the answer? People say, “I want transcendence. I want knowledge. I want to rise up and speak to the archetypes outside of space and time.” Fine! The line forms to the left. Are you ready for that? I’m not.

Do psychedelics always make people kinder and gentler? Do they make us kinder and gentler? Well, it’s an interesting question. I mean, as I get older, I ask it slightly differently of myself. I ask the question: if this stuff is so great, what is so great about us that we’re any different from anybody else? Or are we just like holy rollers and Taoists and Hasidic Jews and everybody else who thinks they’ve found the final answer? What is so great about it?

If we look at it far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness. Seen from a sufficient distance and in a particular light, individuals (principles, in appearance, of egocentrism and permanence) are recognized as no more than staging-posts in a movement.

The coevolution of mammals and their gut bacteria has in effect resulted in the “outsourcing” of developmental signals from animal cells to microbial symbionts. Thus, the symbionts are integrated into the normal networks of animal development, interacting with the eukaryotic cells of their “host”. Development then becomes a matter of interspecies communication. We are not individuals from the viewpoint of developmental biology.

In writing this book, I am to some extent letting the cat out of the bag by publishing things which should be communicated in secret.

You won’t find a bodhisattva sitting all day under a tree in a state of rapt absorption, so that anybody who comes up and knocks on him won’t get an answer. He’ll be like everybody else, or he will look like everybody else, because he will see that this everyday world, too, is it; this no special, nothing special world.

Could it be that a creation that’s better at thinking than any human on Earth might not be fully content to serve as a human extension, even if that’s what it was built to do?

To be in a place that never heard of the fall in the garden of Eden. To be in a place where I can read in one of the Shinto texts, “The processes of nature cannot be evil.” When every impulse, every natural impulse, is not to be corrected, but to be sublimated, you know? To be beautified.

The Great Illumination is not a fantastic, extraordinary state of consciousness remote from normal experience.

This principle of the compressive generation of consciousness has been ceaselessly at work in the human mass.

What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.

If we try to fit our contemporary history into the general pattern of the human past (by applying the same method that has served us for fitting the human past into the general evolution of the Earth) we must conclude that we are standing, at the present moment, not only at a change of century and civilization, but at a change of epoch.

What does it mean that I am at this predicament? What does it mean? What it means is that your conception and sense of yourself as a separate ego is phony. That this self that you have imagined yourself to be is a māyā, an illusion, and you found out that it is because you found out that it’s impotent. It can’t do something. There’s really something that has to be done, but you can’t do it. Also, you can’t help by not doing it. The ego is incapable of either because it is a hoax. It’s a very interesting hoax, and it’s been worthwhile having this drama, but drama it was.

As Lao-tzu said, the wise man hides his virtue and appears on the surface like a fool, for “true grace does not appear as grace, and thus is grace; false grace is so aware of itself as grace that it is not grace.” Zen produces thousands of Bodhisattvas who do not advertise themselves.

Looking at the evolution not of individual species but of entire kingdoms—bacteria, protists, plants, animals, and fungi—it is clear that the broad sweep of evolution is not directionless but moves toward ever-increasing complexity.

We had produced the “they” by being so busy being “we.”

There is no logical reason why the definition of physics cannot be broadened to include in its subject matter the subjective conscious experiences of higher animals.

Hitherto this inner revolution of the mind has been confined to rather isolated individuals; it has never, to my knowledge, been widely characteristic of communities or societies. It has often been thought too dangerous for that. Hence the taboo.

Human beings need religion, are starved for it, and the churches have not delivered. They have not delivered the experience; therefore, alternatives are being explored. It’s quite natural.

Many of you have heard me quote William Blake. It’s always worth repeating. He said: “If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.” In other words: understanding compels belief. You don’t have to hammer on somebody. Your task is to refine your message into an understandable form, and then let the dynamics of intellectual competition decide what is the best model to follow.

Isn’t there in fact an extremely strict correspondence, even to the very details, between the content of any one sphere of consciousness and any other, so far as the external world is concerned? Well, well; and who is going to be the one to establish this correspondence? What does establish it is language, including everything in the way of expression, gesture, taking hold of another person, pointing with one’s finger and so forth, though none of this breaks through that inexorable, absolute division between spheres of consciousness.

Please be good enough to listen, to find out, to question, to doubt—so that your own brain becomes aware of itself.

When you reach a certain point of despair, when you know that you are the one weird child who will never be able to swim, at that moment you’re swimming. Because the desperation and the total inability to do it at all has brought you to a point which we might call “don’t care.” You stop trying. You stop not trying; trying to get it that way. You just have arrived at the insight that your decision, your will, doesn’t have any part in the thing at all. And that’s what you needed to know. You’ve overcome, you see, the illusion of having a separate ego.

We developed language, symbolic representation, dance, theater, so forth and so on, and we acquired and empowered the tremendous imagination that has allowed us to build the cultures that we see around us. That kind of power is only safe in the hands of collective community-minded creatures, and in the hands of ego-driven creatures it leads straight to Auschwitz and the hydrogen bomb—as it did.