One plus one can equal a new one, bigger in mass and enriched in attributes.

We are in the world and the world is in us.

In not taking our civic political life too seriously, we can live it at a decent pace and stop from the idea that it is our sacred duty to impose our wonderful way of life on everybody else.

Computers have been a game-changer, allowing humanity to outsource many of its brain-related tasks and better function as a single organism.

There is no real separation between one thing called “you” and another quite different thing called “the universe.” When you stop talking and naming, they’re quite obviously one.

McLuhan—who’s a very interesting figure as a radical thinker in communications theory, and a devout Catholic—believed that the manifestation of the Holy Ghost was electricity. And to him the ringing of the planet by electronic media was the enfolding arms of an archangel. I mean, he literally saw electricity as God’s love made manifest. And he may not—he hasn’t been proven wrong yet. I mean, it may yet knit us all together, and make us one, and lift us off, and send us to the stars. It’s some wonderful stuff, electricity.

We must feel ourselves members of the whole Earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thought: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality. Similarly, man has no true reality apart from the Earth, nor has the Earth without mankind. It is an unreal concept when the modern scientific investigator thinks, according to his premises, that Earth-evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there.

This process of conquest could be described as progress for the kingdom of life. It journeyed on through one success to another by dealing with the laws of Nature through the help of the invention of new instruments.

Pretty much no discovery about the hardware, no discovery about the biology or the physics of it, should pull you away from the fundamental reality of your being that, whatever it is that you are—groups of cells, an emergent mind pulled down from platonic space, or whatever—whichever of these things are correct, the bottom line is: you are still the amazing integrated being with potential and a responsibility to do things.

None of us are brief island existences, but forms and expressions of one and the same eternal “I am” waving in different ways, such that, whenever this is realized to be the case, we wave more harmoniously with other waves.

The body requires the environment in order to exist. Thus there is a unity of the body with the environment.

A certain ‘intellectual materialism’, by which I mean the according of a certain precedence to the cosmic over the personal, has the effect of leading to a more enlightened cult of the Spirit.

On the one hand the individual unit is lost in number, on the other it is torn apart in the collectivity, and in yet a third direction it stretches out in becoming. This dramatic and perpetual opposition between the one born of the many and the many constantly being born of the one runs right through evolution.

You have to see that life, that the so-called conflict of various species with each other, is not actually a competition. It’s a very strange system of interrelationship, of things feeding on each other and cultivating each other at the same time—the idea of the friendly enemy, the necessary adversary who is part of you. You have conflicts going on in your own body: all kinds of microorganisms are eating each other up. And if that wasn’t happening you wouldn’t be healthy. So all those interrelationships, whether they appear to be friendly relationships (as between bees and flowers) or conflicting relationships (as between birds and worms), they are actually forms of cooperation.

The inception of consciousness within the cosmos may have triggered the beginning, albeit weak and insecure, of a willful evolutionary progression; and that intrinsic to such a progression is the process of complexification of reality.

Behaviorally speaking, what dominance hierarchies mean is a behavioral nexus of ego that is permitted and encouraged within the personality of members of the group. And you can almost say that ego is like a calcareous growth.

Yes, it’s good to show you’re adapted to your environment. But since the environment anyway is variable, the more adaptability you have at the moment, the better you are. So there is a tendency to evolve into systems that can adapt to a wide range of things. If they can adapt only to a particular range of things, they are likely to be eliminated by the next change in the environment.

Obviously, it all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell.

A social insect hive is a kind of living brain. I mean, it is a loosely pheromonally connected nervous system that can have millions of individuals in it.

Even while man is awake, he is in a condition resembling sleep wherever his will is involved. True, he has in his consciousness the ideas lying behind what he wills, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that he knows nothing. He does not know how the idea, “I move my arm”, is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconsciousness and it may truly be said that man is no more conscious of the real process of will than he is of what takes place during sleep.

Do you realize Buddhism—in its initial form, as far as one can tell—is a critique of the notion that survival is the supreme good? It’s never been proved that it’s good to survive.

There is that mysterium tremendum et fascinosum: that a biologically inferior and helpless organism in the unique way of symbolic activity transcends and vanquishes nature and evolution. Symbolism, if you will, is the divine spark distinguishing the poorest specimen of true man from the most perfectly adapted animal.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

What the historical task consists of is humanity turning itself inside out, and .