Every blade and every fascicle, every individual and every nation, will find completion through union with all the others. No longer a succession of eliminations, but a confluence of energies—‘synergy’. Such, if we have ears to hear, is the message of biology.

It’s often thought that Eastern philosophy is against individuality. And this is not true. The unity of man in the universe is not a loss, or a merging, of personality in something impersonal. It’s more like the fact that, when individuality, when personality, is known and experienced as an expression of the whole cosmos, then the person becomes more individual, not less individual. But he becomes individual in a non-strident way.

Human energy presents itself to our view as the term of a vast process in which the whole mass of the universe is involved. In us the evolution of the world towards the spirit becomes conscious. From that moment, our perfection, our interest, our salvation as elements of creation can only be to press on with this evolution with all our strength.

What really we are given is a seamless continuum of phenomena that we are asked—not to understand, that’s preposterous; why should talking monkeys understand reality?—but to feel. We can feel. We have an extremely complex body and nervous system and perceptual apparatus which ushers us into feeling. So you have not mastered a situation when you understand it. When you understand the situation you’re probably on the road to catastrophe. When you feel the situation you are probably moving into a good position, then, to act in that situation.

This means that we stop crusading—that is, acting for such abstract causes as the good, righteousness, peace, universal love, freedom, and social justice, and stop fighting against such equally abstract bogeys as communism, fascism, racism, and the imaginary powers of darkness and evil. For most of the hell now being raised in the world is well intentioned.

Nirvāṇa is a psychological state of mind. It’s not a place, like heaven. It’s not something that’s not here; it is here, in the middle of the turmoil—what’s called saṃsāra, the whirlpool of life conditions. That nirvāṇa is what? It is the condition that comes when you are not compelled by desire, or by fear, or by social commitments—when you hold your center and act out of there.

We learned to center our identity, our selfhood, in the controlling part—the mind—and increasingly to disown as a mere vehicle the part controlled. It thus escaped our attention that the organism as a whole, largely unconscious, was using consciousness and reason to inform and control itself. We thought of our conscious intelligence as descending from a higher realm to take possession of a physical vehicle. We therefore failed to see it as an operation of the same formative process as the structure of nerves, muscles, veins, and bones—a structure so subtly ordered (that is, intelligent) that conscious thought is as yet far from being able to describe it.

There’s a lot of kind of self-congratulatory back-slapping going around these days over the fact that communists everywhere are in hot water and have to admit that they did it wrong, and this gives a lot of satisfaction to people who feel that that means we did it right. We didn’t do it right. They did it wrong, and now admit they did it wrong. We do it wrong and have yet to even raise the possibility of turning away from what we are doing. The internal contradictions of Marxism were based on a false definition of what people are. People do not respond to central planning, hortatory propaganda, and stereotyping—neither do people respond to an ethos of self-denial or a view of human beings that denies the fact that we have certain itches which must be scratched. So I think that the collapse of Marxism is only the collapse of the outer edge of the societal and civilizing assumptions that we have made.

Management geared to equilibrium may ruin ecosystems.

Synergetics will make it possible for all humanity to comprehend that physical Universe is technology and that the technology does make possible all humanity’s option to endure successfully.

The whole universe is a masquerade ball pretending to be a tragedy and then realizing that it’s a ball.

If by ‘digital computer’ we mean anything at all that has a level of description where it can correctly be described as the instantiation of a computer program, then again the answer is, of course, yes, since we are the instantiations of any number of computer programs, and we can think.

Is it a contradiction, is it impossible, to act or to decide without pleasure as the ultimate aim?

After a million years of reflection, there is a dynamic meeting in the consciousness of man between heaven and earth at last endowed with motion, and from it there emerges not simply a world that manages to survive but a world that kindles into fire.

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Imagine a planet-wide community of seamless intelligence where you could log on to the mind of a coral reef as easily as you could log on to the Internet.

You realize that what you love when you love yourself is always some other object than yourself. You like eating ice cream. You like beautiful views. You like your house. You like your friends. You like kissing beautiful girls. You like this. But it’s all not me! See? You suddenly realize you can’t separate your self that you love from everything else that your self implies. Then, you know, you begin to wonder which end is up. But it soon clarifies, and you suddenly see the whole thing—and this can become with psychedelics a very, very vivid thing—the whole universe as a colossal energy play going this way and that way, totally indestructible, and it’s all you, and you didn’t know it. It doesn’t mean you’re the only one. This thing proliferates in millions and millions of centers, but it’s all one center. And you can get the physical sensation of the thing being an enormous, as it were, sort of center of light: of joyous, whooping, glorious, loving BOOM, like that. And this will only usually last for a few moments, where you feel you’ve actually put your finger on the center of reality. And it’s this tremendous luminous energy. Just beautiful!

When you reach a certain point of despair, when you know that you are the one weird child who will never be able to swim, at that moment you’re swimming. Because the desperation and the total inability to do it at all has brought you to a point which we might call “don’t care.” You stop trying. You stop not trying; trying to get it that way. You just have arrived at the insight that your decision, your will, doesn’t have any part in the thing at all. And that’s what you needed to know. You’ve overcome, you see, the illusion of having a separate ego.

We are taught to think that if your life doesn’t have some purpose, you’re a washout; you’re just an idiot. But maybe it’s a very good thing to be an idiot, to be a complete fool, and simply to sit and watch the waves. You know how good a thing it is to sit on a beach and just watch waves breaking and dissolving? You can sit for hours completely fascinated. And children like to do this. They like to sit by a pond and drop pebbles into it and see all the concentric circles coming out of the plop. Why not? You could say: well, it’s much more important to go into business and achieve some substantial results, and raise a family—why? You’re just making a bigger splash, that’s all.

I can distinguish in the Universe a profound, essential Unity, a unity burdened with imperfections, a unity still sadly ‘pulverulent’, but a real unity within which every ‘chosen’ substance gains increasing solidity.

It’s an interesting situation to be told that you have a very limited amount of life left, because it composes your mind for you—wonderfully. And you start paying attention, asking the questions.

We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness. This is all very scary. None of us know what it means. But the forces that have been called into being are now beyond the control of any institution, or any strategic planning committee, or any banking committee. These things have a life of their own.

There are models that win in the short term, but that actually move towards comprehensively worse realities and/or even self-extinction; evolutionary cul-de-sacs. And I would argue that humanity is in the process of pursuing evolutionary cul-de-sacs, where the things that look like they are forward are forward in a way that does not get to keep forwarding. And at the heart of that is optimizing for narrow goals, and at the heart of that is perceiving reality in a fragmented way.

We have not fallen from grace by developing the capability of rational thought—if we use the latter in its proper context. On the contrary, we are called upon to enhance the evolutionary process within and around ourselves by assuming responsibility for it at our appropriate level of evolution, the sociocultural level. Planning becomes an instrument of evolution, not just of our technological environment, but, more importantly, of our own evolution as well.