I think, best-case scenario: we effectively merge with AI, where AI serves as a tertiary cognition layer.

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.

Through us, and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself.

Nature works by steps. The atoms form molecules. The molecules form bases. The bases form amino acids. They form proteins. The proteins work in cells. The cells make, first of all, the simple animals and then sophisticated ones, climbing step by step. Evolution is the climbing of a ladder from simple to complex by steps, each of which is stable in itself.

Supposing we divide the world into two parts—on the one side, matter which has no roots in mass consciousness, and on the other side the living being. Would we not be justified then in saying, “But—interiority, the rudiment of consciousness, exists everywhere; it is only that if the particle is extremely simple, the consciousness is so small that we cannot perceive it; if there is an increase in complexity, this consciousness comes out into the open and we have the world of life?”.

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

I get to know the external world through my sense-perceptions. It is only through them that such knowledge flows into me; they are the very material out of which I construct it. The same applies to everyone else. The worlds thus produced are, if we allow for differences in perspective, etc., very much the same, so that in general we use the singular: world. But because each person’s sense-world is strictly private and not directly accessible to anyone else, this agreement is strange; what is especially strange is how it is established. Many people prefer to ignore or gloss over the strangeness of it, explaining the agreement by the existence of a real world of bodies which are the causes of sense-impressions and produce roughly the same impression on everybody.

It is that soul hidden beneath the countless multitudes of created beings that envelops us in a living network charged with grace and spirituality.

And you know you’re saved only if somebody else isn’t; if somebody else is damned. It’s very difficult to believe or even to imagine a state of affairs where everyone and everything is saved. You have to be a mystic even to think about that. Because it requires having a state of consciousness which transcends oppositions.

There is no need to remember, for, in whatever form, it is always “I” who am there, the mercy of death delivering me again and again from the tedium of immortality.

You won’t find a bodhisattva sitting all day under a tree in a state of rapt absorption, so that anybody who comes up and knocks on him won’t get an answer. He’ll be like everybody else, or he will look like everybody else, because he will see that this everyday world, too, is it; this no special, nothing special world.

Look, now. Cool it. Wake up! See what the scene is. This is the kind of thing that’s going on. And you are not a captive in a trap. You’re not just some mere little measly being that somehow or other was brought into an insane universe, but you are what the thing is. You are not the victim, you are the system. Only, you have identified yourself with one wave in it, and have forgotten that you are one with the whole energy that’s going on.

All alters are immersed, like islands of a single ocean, in the thoughts that constitute the concealed side of the inanimate cosmos.

Thought is matter and it can be made into anything, ugly—beautiful.

The Chinese view is fundamentally… oh, you could almost call it anarchical—or, if you don’t like that word, you could call it democratic. A world which is self-governing—not even through a president, but self-governing in every way. A great and colossal anarchism which moves itself in the same way as you and I move our fingers without directing them in the sense that we know exactly what we’re doing and how we move them (we don’t).

Supposing, just for the sake of illustration, you had the power to dream every night any dream you wanted to dream. And you could, of course, arrange for one night of dreams to be 75 years of subjective time—or any number of years of subjective time—what would you do? Well, of course, you’d start out by fulfilling every wish. You would have routs and orgies, and all the most magnificent food, and sexual partners, and everything you could possibly imagine in that direction. When you got tired of that after several nights you’d switch a bit, and you’d soon find yourself involved in adventures, and contemplating great works of art, fantastic mathematical conceptions; you would soon be rescuing princesses from dragons, and all sorts of things like that. And then one night you’d say, “Now look, tonight what we’re gonna do is: we’re going to forget this dream is a dream. And we’re going to be really shocked.” And when you woke up from that one you’d say, “Whoo, wasn’t that an adventure!”.

One of the great problems of the United States, legally and politically, is that we have never quite had the courage of our convictions. The republic is founded on the marvelously sane principle that a human community can exist and prosper only on a basis of mutual trust.

The interesting thing about the ambiguous value of technological innovations is how little it seems to matter, in practical terms. Progress, it seems, can never be resisted; and once it has been made, it can never be permanently retracted. These are heuristic laws of cultural development, to which we have seen no major exceptions in human history so far. There is an ebb and flow to human affairs, but there is also, in the long term, a powerful overall movement toward greater social complexity and greater technological and intellectual sophistication.

Of special interest are ecosystems whose evolution may be observed within long periods of time. The biomass, i.e. the mass of all life in the system, increases, usually also the primary production from direct photosynthesis (plants) as well. But these two factors do not increase at the same ratio. With the formation of a complex system of trophic levels the energy derived from the same primary production may be handed on from level to level, even if only to a relatively small extent. The total system’s efficiency of energy utilization increases and so does the total energy stored in the system.

I was trained as a psychologist. I was in analysis for many years. I taught Freudian theory. I was a therapist. I took drugs for six years intensively. I have a guru. I have meditated since 1970 regularly. I have taught yoga. I have studied Sufism and many kinds of Buddhism. In all that time I have not gotten rid of one neurosis. Not one!

Fascinating thing about bees and flowers is: they are very different looking things. A flower sits still and blooms and it smells—or stinks, to be correct. The bee moves about and buzzes. But they are all one organism. You don’t find flowers without bees, you don’t find bees without flowers. They are just as much one as your head and your feet, which also look very different.

Western cultures have bred a type of human being who feels strongly alienated from everything which is not his own consciousness. He is a stranger both to the external world and to his own body, and in this sense he has lost his connection with the surrounding universe. He does not know that the “ultimate inside” of himself is the same as the “ultimate inside” of the cosmos, or that, in other words, his sensation of being “I” is a glimmering intimation of what the universe itself feels like on the inside. He has been taught to regard everything outside human skins as so much witless mechanism which has nothing whatsoever in common with human feelings and values. This style of man must therefore see himself as the ghastly and tragic accident of sensitive and intelligent tissue caught up in the cosmic toils like a mouse in a cotton gin.

Big Tech is programming our consciousnesses not only to “stop worrying and love the Big Tech oligopoly,” but also to keep on staring at our phones and jumping from one app to another, while in the meantime, Big Tech and selected governments push hard in the background to create a Singularity that they control.

For heaven’s sake, nobody is suggesting that LSD is a cure for alcoholism. That, to me, is absurd. It’s not a cure for alcoholism, it’s a cure for stupidity! And a person (who is killing themselves by drinking themselves to death) takes 500 mics of LSD and says, “What a stupid person I am! I’m killing myself!” And so then they look at their behavior and they cease that behavior. And this is what has to be done on a societal scale. And it is not as difficult as we may wish to be assured by the establishment.