We have defined nature as dead. You know, atoms screaming through empty space ruled by tensor equations of the third degree—that’s our picture of what nature is. That isn’t what it is. It’s a mind of some sort.

Evolution has become in each one of us to some extent master of its movements and at the same time reflectively conscious of the forces which animate it.

Over hundreds of centuries, hyper-optimized superglue stories came to cover all the bases so thoroughly, they were able to do something biological evolution never could—convince masses of human beings to cooperate. Rather than repress the human primal flame, these stories harnessed it, grabbed its reins, and redirected it—lining up individual flames in parallel lockstep, pointing them all in the direction dictated by the story.

This is the greatest possible lesson for the Western world to learn, because we are so hung up on the idea of power, of control, of being able to make everything go the right way, and we’ve never thought it through. When you get control of it, what are you going to do with it?

I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it’s as if two people are reading each other’s minds.

I think that if we could get a considerable number of people who are doing this, who are able to do this, they would be able to really think together. See, ordinarily, people can’t think together. Each one has his own opinion which is based on his own conditioning. And people really pay very little attention to each other when they try to think together, right? If, say, ten or twenty or thirty people could really think together with one mind, I think they would liberate a tremendous energy which would affect the others.

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness. This is the situation. From a scientific point of view, what is to be done?

Debate has focused on the question of whether mind must be in the head, but a more relevant question in assessing these examples might be: is mind in the present?

If in physical fact man-and-his-environment constitute some sort of unified or polarized field, why do we not feel this to be so instead of feeling ourselves to be rather alien beings confronting a world?

Ego is our problem. I mean, you can talk about nuclear waste or nuclear proliferation, but it all gets back to: we are not willing to set aside our desires for big houses, and many cars, and tremendous comfort. And we do not have group values. The reason the planet is dying is because we cannot place the good of the group above our own desires. Consistently. We know the Earth is dying, and yet, who recently has made a voluntary act of simplification of their life or something like that? We’re aware of the problem, but we can’t—some do, but a vanishingly small amount compared to the people who are just out there striving like crazy to get theirs. And, sadly, the dissolution of communism—which certainly had its problems, they’re there for everybody to see—but the rhetoric of communism was collectivism. You know? Care for the collectivity. In the absence of anybody saying that, now we just have a dog-eat-dog world, and the devil take the hindmost. And it looks like the devil will take the hindmost.

The emphasis on wholeness implies that any separability into discrete facets (even if they are interacting) is itself a conceptual analysis—it is an incidental abstraction from the whole which is always of an all-encompassing order.

Life no longer appears as a thin superstructure over a lifeless physical reality, but as an inherent principle of the dynamics of the universe.

You are not some separate little puppet which is being kicked around by omnipotence. You are omnipotence in disguise.

The “global brain” is the name given to the emerging intelligent network that is formed by all people on this planet together with the computers, knowledge bases, and communication links that connect them together.

Theology guesses at the meaning of the mosaic. Science attempts to scrape away the covering of ignorance and uncover the true nature of the mosaic’s image.

I realized that it was within my power to select and play almost any game, or even to deal myself out of games entirely. I decided at that time that the game I wanted to play was to become the holiest and wisest man of my generation—specifically, to expand and elevate the consciousness of the entire human race. Now, this may sound like a surprising ambition, but I don’t see why. If you can select any game, why not pick the most exciting and challenging game around? With full knowledge, of course—the knowledge that comes from a contemplative series of LSD sessions—that all human games end in a tie, and that the chances of succeeding in any human game are always statistically dubious.

We see a reality that complexifies itself, where, on the inorganic substratum, first appears the organic, then the mental, and then, in ever-growing waves, the spiritual.

The ordinary religious consciousness grasps too much, and has too little faith in the actual present fact of the Life of life as the most all-absorbing and self-evident reality of our existence.

Is there a limit to complexity?

A mankind, totalized, more perfectly than any known living being, under the influence of a single higher soul—not collectivized man, but super-personalized man.

If I say, “I love you,” you will feel good. Maybe it’s true for me and maybe it’s true for you. But it’s not floating around anywhere here, okay? It’s just my emotion and your emotion. Yes, it is nice that our emotions are sweet, our thoughts are sweet, our actions are sweet. It’s wonderful if it is so. But it has only psychological and social relevance. It has no existential relevance. If you want to know life, you have to step out of this bubble called psychological reality and step into existential reality. Then, only, you have a taste of life. Otherwise, you are just a bundle of thoughts, emotions, ideas, opinions, and now I’m there in all that.

What is important here is not the meaning of the words but their actual sound and the movement of the breath and lips, giving direct experience of the basic energy of life as it comes from the void.

You always want to be thinking about the planet as one organism.

Within this fortress he strives to guard and preserve the thing he calls his life, but he might as well try to imprison sunlight in a room by pulling down the blind or trap wind by shutting the door. To enjoy wind you must let it blow past you and feel it against bare flesh; the same is true of time, for the moment has always gone before it can be seized, and the same is true of life which not even this wall of flesh can hold forever. To feel and understand it you must let it blow past you like the wind as it moves across the earth from void to void.