To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape. But so long as you are not aware of the inseparability of thinker and thought, you will try to escape.

In an organic being the whole meaning of the unity lies in its being differentiated into its particular set of organs, and the entire significance of each set of organs comes from their combination into that particular unity.

It is very difficult for us to take stock of the fact that the localization of the personality, of the conscious mind, inside the body is only symbolic, just an aid for practical use.

The religion of the future will be based—as were the religions of the past—upon the human body and the myriad wonders within this temple. Any external event which distracts you from learning how to understand and use the machinery of consciousness within your body is irreverent and irrelevant.

Synergy means: behaviors of whole systems—and a minimum system would be two—behaviors of whole systems unpredicted by behavior of any of the parts of the system when those parts are considered separately, one from the other.

Once again, there is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. Keeping one’s intentions hidden is useful in a zero-sum setting where any inefficiency in the other player’s behavior will be to your benefit. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, you benefit from the other player’s cooperation. The trick is to encourage that cooperation. A good way to do it is to make it clear that you will reciprocate. Words can help here, but as everyone knows, actions speak louder than words. That is why the easily understood actions of TIT FOR TAT are so effective.

You could say psychedelic drugs are an inoculation against the formation of the narcissistic ego.

In times of happiness and pleasure, we are usually ready enough to be aware of the moment, and to let the experience be all. In such moments we “forget ourselves,” and the mind makes no attempt to divide itself from itself, to be separate from experience. But with the arrival of pain, whether physical or emotional, whether actual or anticipated, the split begins and the circle goes round and round.

Capital is money: Capital is commodities. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

Once we emerged in Africa, we spread out in all directions. And then, very, very, very rapidly, we encircled the Earth. And now we have, with our own development, we have created a thin envelope of thought around the planet called the noösphere.

Language is old. Honeybees do it, dolphins do it. It’s even possible (when you think of chemical communication) that flowers and ants do it. Nature is knit together by communication—which has rules, has syntax, and so is language. If you’ve ever stood in a rainforest or any species-dense environment—it’s alive with signals, with sounds, with odors that are carrying messages. These things are not just produced for aesthetic effect, they have intended hearers and so forth and so on.

Many sensations come, many thoughts or images arise, but they are just waves of your own mind. Nothing comes from outside your mind.

Strictly speaking, if matter is defined as ‘something with no vestige of consciousness or spontaneity,’ it does not exist. Even in pre-living particles, we saw, we must conceive some sort of curvature which prefigures and initiates the appearance of freedom and a ‘within.’

The most important thing in human life for one’s sanity is to be able to be playful or to be able to do things which are sublimely useless. Where, you see, there is no room in our lives for the useless and for the purposeless (in this sense of the word), we are in serious danger of going completely crazy. That was the original idea of Sunday: the useless day, the day that was timeout, the day when you weren’t supposed to do anything serious. It was holiday: holy day.

Something clicked in me in which I began to allow myself to be; just allow myself to be. There had been a little hook in there that never—it was always: “I’ll be okay. I’ll be holy when I get rid of those things.” And suddenly it’s: “I am what I am, and it’s okay.” And that desire that that happened is: I can feel it beginning to happen. I can feel myself beginning to appreciate other human beings instead of judging them. The judging always comes from your own sense of separateness.

An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.

We see the consequences of not-feeling all around us. The toxification of the Earth, the toleration of overpopulation—and the institutions that promote it—is all achieved through a deadening of feeling. If we could feel what we are doing—to the Earth, to the elderly, to the young, to racial and social minorities—if we could feel the agony of what we do, we would stop doing it.

We are very near to the time when virtually no essential human function, physical or mental, will lack an artificial counterpart. The embodiment of this convergence of cultural developments will be the intelligent robot, a machine that can think and act as a human, however inhuman it may be in physical or mental detail. Such machines could carry on our cultural evolution, including their own construction and increasingly rapid self-improvement, without us, and without the genes that built us. When that happens, our DNA will find itself out of a job, having lost the evolutionary race to a new kind of competition.

Like any human philosopher, the AI+ would be capable of entertaining the possibility of systematic deception that follows from this distinction. This would inevitably lead it to confront certain questions for which human philosophers have struggled to find satisfactory answers. But a non-biological artefact does not have to be burdened by the overly metaphysical conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood that prevent human philosophers from seeing past such questions, and which seem to fundamentally limit our cognitive constitution.

Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking in time cuts out. This is it. If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.

If, therefore, consciousness ceases to ignore itself and becomes fully self-conscious, it discovers two things: (1) that it controls itself only very slightly, and is thoroughly dependent on other things—father and mother, external nature, biological processes, God, or what you will, and (2) that there is no little man inside, no “I” who owns this consciousness.

Christian detachment subsists wholly in this wider attitude of mind; but instead of ‘leaving behind’ it leads on; instead of cutting off, it raises. It is no longer a break-away but a way through; no longer a withdrawal but an act of emerging.

Global integration entails an eventual harmonization of rules.

Everybody should do—in their lifetime, sometime—two things. One is to consider death: to observe skulls and skeletons, and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Never. That is a very gloomy thing for contemplation, but it’s like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death, and the acceptance of death, is very highly generative of creative life.