The living thing escapes change either by correcting change or changing itself to meet the change or by incorporating continual change into its own being.

Everyone is running around saying, you know, “Recapture your roots, get in touch with your Swedishness, your Irishness, your whateverishness.” And that’s all very fine, but I think it’s your humanness that may have eluded you in all this ethnocentric breast-beating.

We need to experience ourselves in such a way that we could say that our real body is not just what’s inside the skin, but our whole total external environment.

It will be apparent that biology merges into theology, and that the World made Flesh is to be regarded, not as a postulate of science—which would be in the nature of things absurd—but as something, a mysterious Alpha and Omega, taking its place within the whole plan of the universe, both human and divine.

In order to move about in a world and keep ourselves alive, we need to have a model of that world.

The global organism, in order to maximize its own control over its environment and its chances for survival, should maximize the capacity for autonomous decision-making among its components. Moreover, it should maximize the diversity or variety of the strategies used by its components. This can only be achieved by stimulating individuals to develop themselves freely, and as much as possible choose their own path, rather than merely conform to the collective point of view.

Although there is a difference, in a way, between the knower and the known, between man and the world, nevertheless these two go together and they are fundamentally inseparable.

Language is a miracle. I mean, make no mistake about it, I don’t think any amount of dissection of monkeys or human cadavers will give you an insight into language. Language is a behavior of some sort—so bizarre, so many orders of magnitude more complex than anything else we do, that for all practical purposes this is the thumbprint of God upon creation: human language. And it’s a self-transforming thing. It keeps bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels, and it creates for us the entire ambiance of reality.

A great many internal and external portents (political and social upheaval, moral and religious unease) have caused us all to feel, more or less confusedly, that something tremendous is at present taking place in the world. But what is it?

Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc. play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.

It is a well-known fact that the biosphere is a set of nesting dolls. Eco-systems consist of groups that are comprised of organisms, which in turn are made of organs composed of tissues, which consist of cells made up of biochemical networks.

The starting point of most explanations for human behavior is based on our everyday experience. This may be summarized as follows: there is a human being which we may see and an environment in which this being is acting. Thus we have basically two different and separate objects: man and environment. This separation seems to be so self-evident that we usually do not see any reasons to doubt it; actually it would be strange to maintain anything else. There is the physical environment, the world surrounding any organism, and there is the organism with its private inner world (which we may of course doubt in the case of animals, sometimes even of other human beings). The border between the two worlds or systems seems to be clear; it may be located somewhere close to the skin. The two systems are, of course, not separate in the sense that they are in continuous interaction. The organism acts on the outside objects, and these objects exert influences on the organism which reacts through its inner processes.

Thought is matter held within the bonds of time; thought is never free, never new; every experience only strengthens the bondage and so there is sorrow.

The fact of the matter is: nobody knows what’s going on. Nobody knows. Nobody has the faintest idea. The best guesses are lies, you may be sure of it. And so to pretend that one human being will lead another out of the dark night of ignorance and into the shining light of truth is ludicrous. Absolutely grotesque! A product of this empowering of the human image that has gone on through several thousand years of dominator culture. If you want a teacher, try a waterfall or a mushroom or a mountain wilderness or a storm-pounded seashore. This is where the action is.

Although this force is indeed my own in the sense that it is I who concentrate it and experience it, I am quite unable to pin it down, whether I try to decipher any part either of its past or of its future. Behind the unity it assumes in my consciousness there lies hidden the dense multitude of all the succession of beings whose infinitely patient and lengthy labour has carried to its present stage of perfection the phylum of which I am for a moment the extreme bud. My life is not my own: I know this from the inexorable determinism contained in the development of overpowering emotions, in pain and in death. And I feel this, not only in my bodily members but in the very core of what is most spiritual in my being.

It is not as easy as is often presumed, not even for sense perception, to clearly demarcate what is “inside of us” from what is “outside of us.” We are dealing here with a contentious border zone.

Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change, and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village, or the tribe.

Language is very old, thinking is very old, communicating is very old—by glance, by gesture, by dance, by meme, by intuition—but speech is very recent. It’s a technological innovation as fresh as the Pentium chip or the spinning wheel. It’s something someone invented somewhere. It’s the most successful technological leap forward ever made. It’s the discovery of symbolic signification. That a noise—meaning nothing—can by convention be given a meaning, and that that meaning will then attend that utterance wherever it occurs in the presence of those who have joined in the agreement that attaches the symbol to the meaningless utterance. It’s a coding breakthrough. Somebody hacked this about 35,000 years ago.

Washington is convulsed over the possibility of closing an air base near Sacramento. So how can we even conceive of this government making an impact on the real problems? It is still government by flimflam. And that would be all very well if we had five hundred years to dig ourselves out of this dilemma. But if a radical political alternative is not opened up in this country, then we are essentially, I think, going to amuse and entertain ourselves into extinction. The ordinary orthodox system has failed. What Bill Clinton exists to prove—at best!—is that people of good will make no difference in those institutions, because they are compromised and corrupted from the very beginning. It’s just the way it is. Those institutions are set up for business as usual. Business as usual (at this point) is a death sentence on the human race.

Man as an organism is to the world outside like a whirlpool is to a river: man and world are a single natural process, but we are behaving as if we were invaders and plunderers in foreign territory. For when the individual is defined and felt as the separate personality or ego, he remains unaware that his actual body is a dancing pattern of energy that simply does not happen by itself. It happens only in concert with myriads of other patterns—called animals, plants, insects, bacteria, minerals, liquids, and gases. The definition of a person and the normal feeling of “I” do not effectively include these relationships. You say, “I came into this world.” You didn’t; you came out of it, as a branch from a tree.

Since man and in man, simple evolution tends gradually to mutate into auto- (or self-) evolution.

The planet is one living thing.

Those things in life which are most pleasurable almost invariably happen unexpectedly. They are not contrived.

If you think about the life of the universe as we all have learned it from Carl Sagan, you know that we all began as an infinitely small, dense, hot dot. But that didn’t last long, because there wasn’t much going on, because there was so much energy that no arrangements could be made. Then there was a massive explosion and a tremendous drop in temperature. And at that point electrons could settle into orbits around atomic nuclei and you get atomic chemistry, which condenses into stars made of pure hydrogen and helium, which cook out iron and carbon: you get more complex chemistry with more complex bond possibilities. This allows the molecular bond to form for the first time. Suddenly an entirely new universe of possibilities springs into being. And at the end of that cascade of possibilities is organic life. Organic life, then, contorts and conserves information and folds it in upon itself and replicates it and distorts it, and you get more and more advanced forms of higher plant organisms, plants, and animals. Ultimately, this process ushers into human beings with culture; electronic culture. And then, finally, the cataclysmic connectedness of the twentieth century. From a psychedelic point of view this is all a connected process.