Systems always divide all Universe outside the system from all of the Universe inside the system.

Evolution takes on a new character: it becomes primarily a psychosocial process, based on the cumulative transmission of experience and its results, and working through an organised system of awareness, a combined operation of knowing, feeling and willing. In man, at least during the historical and proto-historical periods, evolution has been characterised more by cultural than by genetic or biological change.

Sustained and guided by the tradition of the great human mystical systems, along the road of contemplation and prayer, we succeed in entering directly into receptive communication with the very source of all interior drive.

What starts out with clever search engines and webservers, may end up with something truly cosmic and amazing—a new phase in the evolution of life and intelligence.

We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.

I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes, and realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised in him.

As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.

We don’t like, nowadays, anyone to suggest that our social institutions are not altogether serious. We can’t stand it because we are much too insecure. And this is a very dangerous state of affairs. And so it is really high time that, in many ways, the institution of the fool was reintroduced.

Money is bookkeeping—nothing but bookkeeping!—and therefore the whole idea of taxation, for example, is a complete anachronism. The thing that is stopping the flow of the actual wealth of the world is this fixation on money. What you need to do is actually reverse taxation and, instead of charging taxes, issue credit. But you have to keep the credit balanced to the gross national product in some form of figuring, and then everybody can circulate what they’re making. Otherwise you’re in this ridiculous situation where people are starving in India, and we are hoarding food supplies and burning them and try and dumping them in the ocean, which is sheer insanity. But it’s all based on a psychological block about money.

The power of a human being is not so much in his particular individual identity as in a certain kind of emptiness through which something can flow.

Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

The thing that makes a cyborg a cyborg is their capabilities—not from which side of the skull those capabilities are generated.

If somebody says something—say, “My country above all”—that is like a virus which enters everybody. And unless you have the immune system working, it will spread, right? So when you have got the disease, it’s your disease. Of course, its origin, it’s also the disease of the whole society, right? So that’s to say it’s no use blaming anybody for this or to attribute it to some particular source. You have to say the real problem is this meaning process which has become wrong, right? The process of meaning has gone wrong.

It seems to me that this is what we should really get down to—what should the human race do next?

The centre of consciousness cannot achieve its natural growth rising out of the technical centre of social organisation. Only union through love and in love (using the word ‘love’ in its widest and most real sense of ‘mutual internal affinity’), because it brings individuals together, not superficially and tangentially but centre to centre, can physically possess the property of not merely differentiating but also personalising the elements which comprise it. Even under the irresistible compulsion of the pressures causing it to unite, Mankind will only find and shape itself if men can learn to love one another in the very act of draing closer.

In the next quarter century, you’ll see the development of more and more international organizations that do such vital jobs that everybody will have to cooperate with them. In the past, we’ve had the International Postal Union and the International Telegraph Union and today, of course, we have Intelsat, an organization of some 70 countries cooperating in the global communications system. We also have the organizations of the airlines, the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization. These independent bodies and others like them will become so essential and supranational in the next few decades that they will be running the world. The nation-state will find itself a postal division, a cultural subsection in these organizations. This is how we’ll merge into a world society.

Among the educated young there is a startling and unprecedented interest in the transformation of human consciousness. All over the Western world publishers are selling millions of books dealing with Yoga, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and the chemical mysticism of psychedelic drugs, and I have come to believe that the whole “hip” subculture, however misguided in some of its manifestations, is the earnest and responsible effort of young people to correct the self-destroying course of industrial civilization.

Are we not at every instant living the experience of a universe whose immensity, by the play of our senses and our reason, is gathered up more and more simply in each one of us? And in the establishment now proceeding through science and the philosophies of a collective human Weltanschauung in which every one of us co-operates and participates, are we not experiencing the first symptoms of an aggregation of a still higher order, the birth of some single centre from the convergent beams of millions of elementary centres dispersed over the surface of the thinking earth?

If you’re afraid of chaos, you can’t be psychedelic. Chaos is the mother of form. It has been the fear of chaos that created this constipated, linear, anti-human society that we’re trying to overthrow. So my call is to a kind of anarchy. Chaos is the mother of everything we love. There can’t be enough of it. Surrender to the psychedelic experience, surrender to the historical experience, means: embracing chaos. Hang on, we’ll be fine once we get to the other side. Keep the faith, stay stoned.

Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science.

The two concepts, drugs and computers, are migrating toward each other.

What are the minimal neuronal mechanisms that are necessary for any one conscious percept?

Psychedelics are very frequently successful in giving the individual a vivid sensation of the mutual interdependence of his own behavior and the behavior of his environment, so that the two seem to become one—the behavior of a unified field.

You want to live this? Resentment, blame, and judgment—they’ve got to go, and it doesn’t matter why you have them. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happened, it doesn’t matter who did it.