If anybody starts to cost resources properly, price resources properly—meaning pay for what it would cost to produce that thing renewably via recycling and whatever it is, and not produce pollution in the environment through known existing technology—they would price themselves out of the market completely relative to anyone else not doing that. So either everybody has to, or nobody can, right? And whether we’re talking about pricing carbon or pricing copper or pricing anything, as you say well, we price things at the cost of extraction plus a tiny margin defined by competition, and that was not what it cost the Earth to produce those things, or the cost to the ecosystem and other people of doing it.

And what would you say, then, of a culture which took this standpoint: music not allowed. Music is a diversion from reality. You know, that kind of awful, utilitarian attitude—but really, one of the basic things, you see, that we live for. What makes it worth surviving and going on is there can be such a thing as music, there can be dancing. In other words, that we can do things that are absolutely irrelevant so far as mere survival is concerned.

If there is in any sense a reason for the world’s existence it must be sought in the present.

It would certainly appear that, even if our perceptions are still irrevocably enclosed within certain limits of greatness and smallness, we can at least flatter ourselves that we have discovered and established experimentally the law of recurrence that governs the structure of the cosmos. The analysis of matter is making us see it as a limitless aggregation of centres taking over and mastering one another in such a way as to build up, by their combinations, more and more complex centres of a higher order.

Cells self-organize into bodies, which self-organize into communities.

We are in the world and the world is in us.

I mean, where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a raccoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident. But in our own case we make an exception.

The mushroom said to me once, it said, “This is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars.” You don’t depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions. It’s a fire in a madhouse. And that’s what we have: the fire in the madhouse at the end of time. This is what it’s like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this.

The true God is not yet, but the true God will be, because the creational process is.

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human. These two components are everywhere “in the air.”

There is an aspect of the psychedelic experience not easily captured by existing theories. And yet, this quality is so central to the psychedelic experience that it is arguably its most notable and surprising quality. It is the sensation that psychedelics “expand consciousness,” “heighten awareness,” or reveal “higher states of consciousness.”

The form, having separate existence as it has, is itself a ‘substance.’ It is a substance from the stars, from the stars above the planets. Its provenance is celestial.

To let go in that sense, and allow and really consider the possibility that everything in life is completely out of control and at random, but go with it—this is fundamental to any kind of strength, any kind of real control.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, mutual gaze provides a shared view.

It is only proper to realize that language is largely a historical accident. The basic human languages are traditionally transmitted to us in various forms, but their very multiplicity proves that there is nothing absolute and necessary about them.

What we now propose is to regard the thinking envelope of the biosphere as of the same order of zoological (or if you like, telluric) magnitude as the biosphere itself. The more one considers it, the more this extreme solution seems the only honest one. Unless we give up all attempts to restore man to his place in the general history of Earth as a whole without damaging him or disorganizing it, we must place him above it, without, however, uprooting him from it. And this amounts to imagining, in one way or another, above the animal biosphere a human sphere, the sphere of reflexion, of conscious invention, of the conscious unity of souls.

Mental activity appeared when the result of action contained the whole organization of the system and aided the development of the entire system. Thus, mental activity is not some mystical “emergent property” of the organization of neural elements (the brain) only, but a form of action necessarily following from the complicated development of the organism-environment system.

Imagine the idea that, the moment you were born, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice, and you’re falling. As you fell, a great lump of rock came with you, and it’s traveling alongside you, and you’re clinging to it for dear life, and thinking, “Gee, I’ve got to hold on to this!” You see? Well, it doesn’t do a thing for you. And it’s only making you anxious. And it’s only when you understand that it doesn’t do a thing for you, that you let go and relax.

If you don’t know what’s going on—at a dinner party, in a corporation, in an environment—then the best course is to keep your mouth shut and pay attention and try to appreciate the situation. It’s ridiculous to attempt to seize the tiller of reality, because we don’t even know where we want to go!

Your phone is as much “you” as your vocal cords or your ears or your eyes. All of these things are simply tools to move thoughts from brain to brain—so who cares if the tool is held in your hand, your throat, or your eye sockets?

Let’s suppose I have a rope, and this rope begins by being manila rope, then it goes on by being cotton rope, then it goes on with being nylon, then it goes on with being silk. So I tie a knot in the rope, and I move the knot down along the rope. Now, is it—as it moves along—the same knot or a different knot? We would say it is the same because you recognize the pattern of the knot. But at one point it’s manila, at another point it’s cotton, another point it’s nylon, and another it’s silk. And that’s just like us. We are recognized by the fact that, one day, you face the same way as you did the day before, and people recognize your facing. So they say that’s John Doe or Mary Smith. But, actually, the contents of your face—whatever they may be; the water, the carbons, the chemicals—are changing all the time. You’re like a whirlpool in a stream. The stream is doing this consistent whirlpooling and we always recognize—like at Niagara: the whirlpool is one of the sights, but the water is always moving on. And we are just like that, and everything is like that.

The direction of evolution seems very likely to be that life is moving to the position where it will be omnipotent: where life can do anything it wishes to do. And in general you can see that even on the surface of a primitive planet like this. From the time life started here, it has spread itself all over the planet, taking whatever form it has to take to adapt to any condition. Life has gotten to the top of the Himalayas; there are lifeforms up there. Life has gotten to Little America. Look at the sidewalk closely when you’re taking a walk and you see little bits of grass coming up between the cracks. Life has found a way to break through the concrete. Life seems to have a tremendous Dionysian exuberance about it—what Nietzsche called a will to power—and life seems to be aiming at nothing less than the attainment of divinity. We are part of the process of evolution from amoebas to cosmic immortals.

Each mind—through its own personal experience—is in organic connection with all of them and is, therefore, potentially conscious of the whole common world.

My idea with psychedelics throughout my whole career with them was that they were—the purpose was to go out into mindspace and hunt ideas, and bring something back to show the folks around the campfire. Something that would astonish and amaze us all.