I see the cosmos, if you will, as a kind of novelty-producing engine; a kind of machine which produces complexity in all realms—physical, chemical, social, whatever—and then uses that achieved level of complexity as the platform for further complexity.

The reason why you want to stop grasping is that it’s a new form of grasping. You feel that you will beat the game by being unattached. See, it’s horrible to grieve when somebody you love dies. So maybe, by being unattached to that person, I can avoid grief. Pretty cold, isn’t it? Maybe, you see, by not having an ego, when life comes and bangs on me, if there’s nobody there, it’ll be alright. So that’s why I want non-ego state. That’s phony. All this is a new way of safeguarding and protecting the ego.

What is your relationship to another when “tomorrow,” psychologically, is not there?

Up to now we have been looking at matter as such, that is to say according to its qualities and in any given volume—as though it were permissible for us to break off a fragment and study this sample apart from the rest. It is time to point out that this procedure is merely an intellectual dodge.

If you’ve got a prudish father and mother, you should be very grateful to them for having made sex so interesting!

If a corporation is to be a true organism as distinct from an organization, it must be based on the principle of mutual trust, and not on law. Because if you can’t trust other people, you cannot have a community—not even a corporation.

Then the realization of grandeur of the human soul, immediately followed by the rapture of the realization of God. He glances back and sees how futile his life and ambitions have so far been. Then realizes his present reconcilement with the cosmos and that the rest of his life must be continual joy.

Because land, factories, and people are long-lived, slowly changing, physical elements of the system, there is a limit to the rate at which any leader can turn the direction of a nation.

Children are given an immense artificial desire for toys. A toy shop seems paradise. But when, on Christmas Day, the beautiful tree and all the tinsel and all the stuff and packages, wonderfully wrapped—you know, the wrappings are better than the contents! More beautiful! They get all these things out and the room is strewn with guns and buses and dolls and all that stuff. By four o’clock in the afternoon they are screaming frantic. Because actually, the whole thing was a terrible letdown. And that happens again and again. But that happens to the adults, you see? The adults are merely repeating for the children what they’re doing. They’re acquiring all this kind of pretentious junk and thinking that’s the answer, and it’s a letdown.

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.

I see no reason in principle why we couldn’t give a machine the capacity to understand English or Chinese, since in an important sense our bodies with our brains are precisely such machines. But I do see very strong arguments for saying that we could not give such a thing to a machine where the operation of the machine is defined solely in terms of computational processes over formally defined elements; that is, where the operation of the machine is defined as an instantiation of a computer program.

A deeper understanding of natural (contrasted to engineering) systems reveals positive feedback as one of the intrinsic characteristics by which many natural systems—from atoms to galaxies, cells to organisms, social systems to whole populations, single concepts to cognitive systems and whole languages—manage to live and evolve.

It’s really strange to me that science is in the act of flinging open the curtains on a staggering vision of what it is to be alive in this cosmos. I mean, we now can look back through the Hubble and other telescopes thirteen billion years, to within six-hundred million years of the primary explosion that presumptively created this universe. Meanwhile, we’re tearing open the nature of the human genome, the nature of the heart of the atom. This is the great, great age for the expansion of the scientific vision. But the population is somehow incapable of staying up with what’s going on, and so we have the greatest proliferation of occultism in all forms since the sixteenth century. It’s almost as though there’s a bifurcation of the culture. The scientific—the makers of new science are going deeper and deeper in a direction that the rest of the public not only cannot follow them into, but is actually headed the other way. And it’s a condemnation of our educational system that people have not understood that science, for all its flaws, is the only tool for understanding the nature of reality that has any kind of track record whatsoever. The others just have a story to tell.

Sophisticated observers (C. H. Waddington and Erich Jantsch) found not the War in Nature that Darwinists reported, but rather a situation in which it was not competitive ability but ability to maximize cooperation with other species that most directly contributed to an organism’s being able to function and endure as a member of a biome.

The religion of science is dead. To take over from it, there must be a new mysticism.

Supposing, for example, you find yourself (or you imagine yourself) in a situation where you can control everything, and you know always, therefore, exactly what is going to happen next. This would not—would it?—be a pleasurable situation for very long. It would be boring. And after a while you would want to get into a situation also where you were not in control, where things would occur to surprise you.

Change is not merely a force of destruction. Every form is really a pattern of movement, and every living thing is like the river, which, if it did not flow out, would never have been able to flow in. Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer. The human body lives because it is a complex of motions, of circulation, respiration, and digestion. To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

The whole planet is a vast potlatch: we are robbing our children and their children of any sort of recognizable future by basically grabbing it all for ourselves. No other society in history has been so callous to human values that it condemned generations unborn of its own children to live in a desert.

We are thinking together about the whole question of psychological evolution. Because man, throughout the millennia, has been accustomed—is used, conditioned—to think that he will evolve. “I am this today. Give me time to change. I am envious, frightened, burdened with enormous sorrow, and I must have time to get over it, to go beyond it.” This is what we are used to. So the speaker is saying whether such psychological evolution exists at all. Or: it is the invention of thought because it says, “I cannot change today, give me time. For god’s sake, tomorrow.” The everlasting becoming.

A universe totally conscious that its last hiatus, full knowledge and creation, is nondimensional because it is infinitely complex, and not temporal because it is utterly durational.

How can we fail to discern in the simultaneous rise of Society, the Machine, and Thought this threefold tide that is bearing us upwards, the essential and primordial process of Life itself—I mean, the organic in-folding of Cosmic matter upon itself, whereby ever-increasing unity, accompanied by ever-heightened awareness, is achieved by ever more complicated structural arrangements?

Using religion for growth requires an innovative take on things, since at a fundamental level, most religions seem to treat people like children instead of pushing them to grow. Many of today’s religions play to people’s fog with “believe in this or else…” fear-mongering and books that are often a rallying cry for ‘us vs. them’ divisiveness. They tell people to look to ancient scripture for answers instead of the depths of the mind, and their stubborn certainty when it comes to right and wrong often leaves them at the back of the pack when it comes to the evolution of social issues.

If there is a purely physical explanation of brain performance, then computerlike structures are in principle capable of precisely duplicating such performance.

The nonsensicality of the conception of an isolated self-organizing system.