And how many steps backward in the process of trying to define and honor the human spirit have occurred because of drugs like sugar, opium, tea, coffee? Look at the caffeine drugs: they’re the only drugs on Earth that modern industrialists recognize to the point that they write them into contracts with workers—the coffee break. This isn’t because they love workers, it’s because it makes workers work!

Western cultures have bred a type of human being who feels strongly alienated from everything which is not his own consciousness. He is a stranger both to the external world and to his own body, and in this sense he has lost his connection with the surrounding universe. He does not know that the “ultimate inside” of himself is the same as the “ultimate inside” of the cosmos, or that, in other words, his sensation of being “I” is a glimmering intimation of what the universe itself feels like on the inside. He has been taught to regard everything outside human skins as so much witless mechanism which has nothing whatsoever in common with human feelings and values. This style of man must therefore see himself as the ghastly and tragic accident of sensitive and intelligent tissue caught up in the cosmic toils like a mouse in a cotton gin.

Modern thought is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative value of synthesis in evolution. It is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual, and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and theorems. We are now inclined to admit that at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order. And with this admission, consciousness, life and thought are on the threshold of acquiring a right to existence in terms of science.

Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.

In an arcology, the built environment and the living processes of the inhabitants interact as organs, tissues, and cells do in a highly evolved organism.

We’re going to have to decide how much of the monkey we want to take with us into the future. We don’t want to take the homicidal killer, we don’t want to take the male dominator—but it would probably be a mistake to leave the body entirely behind. After all, the body gives us our orientation in the world, and our sense of ourselves as somehow coextensive with animal life. But how much of what we call human is really human is going to be major topic for discussion from here to the end of time.

We are so perversely committed in the way we invest energy. A modern, well-equipped fighter plane costs 75 million dollars. The United States government orders them in lots of 500 at a time. You know what 75 million dollars would do to consciousness research in California? The cost of one fighter plane! I, and the people I know, and they people they know could deliver the millennium for that kind of money if the law stood back. Because what we’re talking about is a correlation of data that has gone on now for 400–500 years: botanical data, chemical data, human data, anthropological data, data about language, data about complex systems generally, mathematical models, dynamics, chaos theory, so forth and so on. These are the tools out of which an understanding of the dynamics of mind can be created. And creating an understanding of the dynamics of mind is the way out of the political logjam. No amount of haranguing and preaching is going to do it. It requires a breakthrough to the mechanics of our selves. That’s what it basically comes down to: that we must see ourselves as potentially salvageable, reprogrammable, and worth saving.

The unit of selection—that is driving the dominant feature for sapiens—the unit of selection is a group. That’s actually a really important thing to think about as opposed to that the unit of selection is an individual, because we have such an individualistically-focused culture today, and we think in terms of individual focus way excessively to the actual evolutionary fitness of an individual outside of a tribe.

Is there a limit to complexity?

The hivemind society is not just a mere possibility to which we should be open, but is also a possibility that we should desire, because it contains within it a pathway to flourishing.

You had fifty-two years. Why in the name of heavens haven’t you changed? So it means you are accepting the future. Something will happen to make you change.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

But the truth of the matter is: it all begins here! This is where the creation begins! And you’re doing it and won’t admit it.

The meaning of “chaos,” the first time the word appeared in literature, has got nothing whatsoever—apparently, superficially—to do with what we mean by “chaos” in the English language and in ordinary life. It meant only to Hesiad, according to the lexicon, “the gaping void between heaven and Earth out of which the creation came.” So creation out of chaos, yes. But the chaos did not mean disorder or anything negative, it only meant this “gaping void.”

Once they have attained their definite form at the end of each verticillate ray, the elements of a phylum tend to come together and form societies just as surely as the atoms of a solid body tend to crystallise.

Apparently, the way the universe works is upon a platform of previously achieved complexity—chemical, electrical, social, biological… whatever—new forms of complexity can be built that cross these ontological boundaries. In other words, what I mean by that is that biology is based on complex chemistry, but it is more than complex chemistry. Social systems are based on the organization that is animal life, and yet it is more than animal life.

When we aggregate socially, there’s something like a collective cultural vision that we’re living in, breathing in, dressing in all the time, and it keeps us from flipping out, basically, into the undigested pre-linguistic chaos of the who-knows-what right around the corner.

I am thinking, of course, in the first place of the extraordinary network of radio and television communications which, perhaps anticipating the direct syntonization of brains through the mysterious power of telepathy, already link us all in a sort of “etherized” universal consciousness.

The feeling that we call “I” is how everything feels on the inside. But it is always in a particular place at a particular time. And these particular places and particular times, they keep going on and on and on and on and on. Myriads of them, all over—not only on this globe, but probably in worlds scattered throughout the whole cosmos—the “I”-feeling arises. And you feel that you are “I” just as much as I feel that I am “I.” And your “I”-feeling and my “I”-feeling are essentially the same—only, we’re looking from different places. But it’s all one “I.”

It is surely the case that the brain contains no material objects other than its own channels and switchways and its own metabolic supplies and that all this material hardware never enters the narratives of the mind. Thought can be about pigs or coconuts, but there are no pigs or coconuts in the brain; and in the mind, there are no neurons, only ideas of pigs and coconuts. There is, therefore, always a certain complementarity between the mind and the matters of its computation. The process of coding or representation that substitutes the idea of pigs or coconuts for the things is already a step, even a vast jump, in logical typing. The name is not the thing named, and the idea of pig is not the pig.

Step by step, almost like Achilles approaching the tortoise, the student is being brought together with himself to the point where he catches up with his own inner being and can accept it completely. And that is, you see, the most difficult thing to do: to accept one’s self completely. Because the moment you can do that, you have, in effect, done psychologically what is the equivalent of saying, in philosophical or theological terms, “You as you are now are the Buddha”—just as I was explaining a few minutes ago. That’s unbelievable. Because we’re always trying to get away from ourselves as we are now in one fashion or another. And we will only stop doing that through a series of experiments in which we try resolutely to get away from ourselves as we are.

We confuse ourselves—as living organisms, which are one with this whole universe—with something we call our personality.

That’s the transcendent aspect of being, when awareness becomes conscious of itself: “Oh! I am!”

Seeing is sensing. Hearing is sensing. Touching is sensing. Smelling is sensing. What each of us happens to sense is different. And our different senses are differently effective under ever-differing circumstances. Our individual brains coordinatingly integrate all the ever-different sensings of our different faculties. The integrated product of our multifold individual sensings produces awareness. Only through our sensings are we aware of the complementary “otherness.”