Synergy means: behaviors of whole systems—and a minimum system would be two—behaviors of whole systems unpredicted by behavior of any of the parts of the system when those parts are considered separately, one from the other.

The body is that portion of nature with which each moment of human experience intimately cooperates. There is an inflow and outflow of factors between the bodily actuality and the human experience, so that each shares in the existence of the other. the human body provides our closest experience of the interplay of actualities in nature.

All of this as it is is as it has to be, and it is a manifestation of the eternal presence in the world. The end of things always is painful. Pain is part of there being a world at all.

The whole game we play with ourselves is: I am not responsible. A person can turn back to their parents and say, “You got me in this mess! You two, males and females, were having fun in bed together, and as a result of this, you irresponsibly created me. And you didn’t provide for me properly—you were economically unsound or something, and I blame you for all this!” See? What an alibi that is! But all life is based on this game. And nobody will admit, you see, that the evil gleam in your father’s eye, when he was after your mother, was you. That same surge of life was just the same as you are, see? You stated the problem, and you can’t just blame somebody else.

Spirituality is a deep sense of inner freedom based on the realization that one’s self is in complete union and harmony with life, with God, with the Self of the universe or whatever that principle may be called. It is the realization that that union has existed from all time, even though one did not know it, and that nothing in all the world nor anything that oneself can do is able to destroy it. It is thus the sense that the whole might of the universe is at work in one’s every thought and action, however trivial and small. In fact this is true of all men and all things, but only the spiritual man really knows it, and his realization gives a subtly different quality to his life; all that he does becomes strangely alive.

What does it mean that I am at this predicament? What does it mean? What it means is that your conception and sense of yourself as a separate ego is phony. That this self that you have imagined yourself to be is a māyā, an illusion, and you found out that it is because you found out that it’s impotent. It can’t do something. There’s really something that has to be done, but you can’t do it. Also, you can’t help by not doing it. The ego is incapable of either because it is a hoax. It’s a very interesting hoax, and it’s been worthwhile having this drama, but drama it was.

Since the dim nebula of consciousness in Life’s world became intensified into a centre of self in Man, his history began to unfold its rapid chapters; for it is the history of his strenuous answers in various forms to the question rising from this conscious self of his, “What am I?” Man is not happy or contented as the animals are; for his happiness and his peace depend upon the truth of his answer.

Successful communication exchanges, even as minimal as communicative eye contact, can create representations of collective metacognition that subsequently increase cooperative behavior and decision-making.

These notes bring to us our message of invitation. They eternally urge us to come out from the seclusion of our self-centred life into the realm of love and truth. Are we deaf by nature, or is it that we have been deafened by the claims of the world, of self-seeking, by the clamorous noise of the market-place? We miss the voice of the Lover, and we fight, we rob, we exploit the weak, we chuckle at our cleverness, when we can appropriate for our use what is due to others; we make our lives a desert by turning away from our world that stream of love which pours down from the blue sky and wells up from the bosom of the earth.

I kidded with you earlier that they would make sex illegal if they could. Well, they can’t, so it isn’t. But the psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams. And yet it is illegal. We are infantilized. We’re told, “You can wander around within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness, and we have some intoxicants over here if you want to mess yourself up. We’ve got some scotch here, and some tobacco, and red meat, and some sugar, and a little TV,” and so forth and so on. But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage. It’s a sign of cultural immaturity. And the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.

Ephemeralization is at the basis of all evolutionary progress. The increasing productivity means that less resources and labor are needed to produce the same amount of goods or services. It leads to a steadily decreasing importance of physical production factors, such as matter, energy, space, and time, and a concomitantly increasing importance of cybernetical factors, such as information, communication, intelligence, knowledge, and organization, which are necessary to efficiently regulate the processes.

Thought divides the present moment up into separate things, labels everything it has created, and then invents stories about how it all works. Thought tells us, “That is a bird cheeping out there. I am in here hearing it.” By describing what’s appearing in that way, thought creates the illusion that there is an “out there” and an “in here.” It suggests that “the bird” is some thing separate from “me,” that there’s an “I” separate from “the hearing” who is “doing” the hearing, that there’s “a bird” separate from “the cheep,” and “a sound” separate from “the hearing.” By the way that it describes and labels things, thought literally creates a mirage world of separate things, a world that comes to seem completely believable and real, just as a movie or a dream or a mirage seems real and believable. But this world created by thought is conceptual. It’s not what we actually perceive, but rather, it is what we’ve learned to think we are perceiving. Thought evaluates and judges everything, has all kinds of ideas about how things should be, how they could or should be different—how I should be different, how the others should be different, how the world should be different. Thought creates stories about where we think we’re going and where we think we’ve been.

There is no magic ceiling on the intelligence of machines. We are going to make machines more intelligent than we are. In many ways, in many areas, they already are more intelligent than we are. And what it will mean when suddenly the system awakens to itself is not clear. I mean, this may be cheap science fiction, or it may be precisely how the end of the world will occur. This thing is being born. How it will view us—I don’t know.

This program of material civilization—exteriorization of ideas into matter through, first, alchemy and magic, and then science and industry—this process is coming to an end one way or another. We are either going to plant ourselves and most of the rest of the life on this planet by blindly pursuing this cultural model until we run it right over the edge into the apocalypse, or from the genes, from the bones, from the oceans, from the forests, from the glaciers, there is going to have to come a turning point, a change, a revulsion so profound that is allows us by the tens of millions to change how we think about reality, to change how we live.

The world is entering into a phase of progressively more chaotic oscillation. This is not a consequence of what human beings have done, it’s part of the dynamics of the human-biological-geological matrix that represents the planet. Biology never stands still. It moved from the unicellular phase into the multicellular phase, it occupied all niches, it left the oceans, it occupied the land. It then entered into linguistic phase space: it entered into the domain of meaning, and there it erected conscious reflecting societies and individuals. Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening. If you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you. Just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were listening to music. Don’t try to identify the sounds you are hearing, don’t put names on them, simply allow them to play with your eardrums.

What can be distinguished on the horizon is nothing but, and nothing less than, a continual increase of organization and of centricity—and this time on the scale not of the particle but of the sphere: the accelerated impetus of an earth in which preoccupation with production for the sake of well-being will have given way to the passion for the discovery for the sake of fuller being—the super-personalization of a super-humanity that has become super-conscious of itself in the increasing light of Omega.

I was taught by my mother that I was Alan Watts, and I’ve never been able to recover from it completely!

If people are intelligent (and I suppose we have to grant that “if”), then the energy which people express must also be intelligent. Because one does not gather figs from thistles and grapes from thorns. But it does not occur, you see, to the ordinary civilized person to regard himself or herself as an expression of the whole universe. It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water, and solar temperature; that all these things “gowith” us and are as important to us (albeit outside our skins) as our internal organs—heart, stomach, brain, and so forth.

A hivemind society may be desirable for a number of reasons, including that such a society would increase the goods of intimacy and goal achievement, and that it would free us from the chains of individualism.

The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

Supposing you’ve achieved something great, and you say, “No, it wasn’t my ego that did it. It was all these myriad little molecules and cells, each one of whom contributed to this extraordinary thing that I did.” See? You could go in that way towards infinite diversity, and say of everything that you did: “No, it wasn’t me. It was my people. It was all these little fellows who, each one of them, did it.” But to the degree that you go towards the infinitude of the little ones, to that extent you have a true sense of unity. Whereas if you don’t give any credit to the little ones, and you say, “Well, I just push them around, and so on and so forth,” you don’t realize how things are put together.

That’s what it’s really about. All these disparate physical elements come to nothing if they don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. And the more than the sum of their parts is this transcendental element which we call love. That is the part of the eschaton that has never left us, that accompanied us across the African grassland and into history. I mean, granted, bloodied and battered by the experiences of sexism and racism and so forth, but never lost as an ideal, never lost as a guiding light and an experience. And I really think that when we dissolve all the boundaries, this is what we will discover: is an unconditional caring, an unconditional affection, that flows through all life and all matter and gives it meaning. And you don’t have to wait for the end of the world to get this news. You can just short-circuit the collective march toward that realization by accelerating your own microcosm of spirituality through the use of these hallucinogens. They are the doorways that the Gaian mind has installed in the historical process to let anybody out any time they want to, provided they have the courage to turn the knob and walk through the door.

In man, and starting with man, we have a folding back and a general convergence upon itself (both in its mechanism and in its products) of evolution’s most axial nucleus.