The way an ecologist describes human behavior is as an action: what you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.
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.
We need a new kind of consciousness in which every individual becomes aware that his real self is not just his conscious ego.
Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self; more really us than I. And if you become aware of that unknown self, the more you become aware of it, the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that there is. That you are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and that, furthermore, this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. And that vast thing that you see far off, far off, far off with telescopes, and you look, and look, and look—one day you’re going to wake up and say, “Why, that’s me!”
Nature—human nature included—is an organism.
Cultivate an attitude to life where you’re not trying to get anything out of it.
If you can only do things because somehow you’re going to get something out of it, you’re a vulture.
See, human beings are really a lot of tubes. And all living creatures are just tubes. And these tubes have to put things in at one end and let it out at the other. Then they get clever about it and they develop nerve ganglia on one end of the tube—the eating end—called a head. And that’s got eyes in it, it’s got ears in it, it’s got little organs—antennae and things like this—and that helps you to find things to put in one end so that you can let them out the other. Well, while you’re doing this, you see, the stuff going through wears the tube out. And so that the show can go on the tubes have complicated ways of making other tubes, who go on doing the same thing. In at one end, out the other. And they say, “Well, that’s terribly serious! That’s awfully important; we’ve got to keep on doing this.”
Here’s the choice, then: are you going to trust it or not? If you do trust it you may get let down. And this “it” is your self, your own nature, and all nature around you. There are going to be mistakes. But if you don’t trust it at all, you’re going to strangle yourself. You’re going to fence yourself ’round with rules and regulations and laws and prescriptions and policemen and guards—and who’s going to guard the guards, and who’s going to look after Big Brother to be sure that he doesn’t do something stupid? No go.
To live I must have faith. I must trust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust myself to a nature which doesn’t have a boss. Because a boss is a system of mistrust.