The ability to plan actions for which the reward is a long way off is the central thing that the human brain has, to which there’s no match in animal brains.

In the ordinary way we are conditioned to think, “I/me/myself lies only on the inside of my skin.” When you do this flip, you’ll discover that your outside is as much you as your inside. You can’t have an inside without an outside. So if the inside is yours, the outside is yours. You have to acknowledge that the world outside the skin is as much yours as the world inside the skin. Everybody’s outside is different, just as everybody’s inside is different. But eventually, everybody’s outside is all the same outdoors. See? And it’s in this way that we are one. Your body is in your soul, not your soul in your body.

Reflexion, from which has arisen the discovery of the artificial instrument and, consequently, the invasion of the world by the human species: this is the faculty possessed by every human consciousness of turning in on itself in order to recognize the conditions and mechanism of its own activity.

The interrelationship of the self-organization dynamics of material and energetic processes from chemistry through biology to sociobiology and beyond seems to point to the existence of a general dynamic system theory which is valid in a very wide domain of natural systems.

When you then change your level of magnification so that you go down to the small components, you suddenly find that what you thought was a thing (that is to say, a unity) disappears into a multiplicity.

Every new war, embarked upon by the nations for the purpose of detaching themselves from one another, merely results in their being bound and mingled together in a more inextricable knot.

A system just can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long term delays. That’s why a massive central-planning system, such as the Soviet Union or General Motors, necessarily functions poorly.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge—the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

The point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky; you look in you.

Religion in the West is largely a matter of belief in a certain scheme of things, and in morals. Neither of these two questions looms very large in Hinduism and Buddhism. Morals to a certain extent, yes, but they aren’t interested in whether you have the right beliefs and the right ideas so much as whether you have a certain kind of experience. And that can be reached only through an experimental process—the process of experimentation called yoga.

The universe is a complexity-conserving engine. Whatever complexity it achieves by any means, it makes that the platform for a further thrust into deeper complexity.

We’re moving into a world where the bankruptcy of ideology is obvious. All ideologies are faiths. Even science can be demonstrated to be a faith that rests on certain revealed truths which are never questioned. To build a non-toxic future, we are going to simply have to solve many of our problems pragmatically. For instance, right now we have many problems: AIDS, overpopulation, this and that. All of these problems could be solved, except that we have one rule when we approach a problem: the solution must make money. There are many problems where there is no solution that makes money. So if you refuse any solution but that type, you’re upriver.

A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity.

The “complexity-consciousness” mechanism gains an added impulse, acquiring a new dimension through new procedures. It is no longer simply a matter of cells organized by the hazards of natural selection, but of completed zoological units inventively building themselves into organisms on a planetary scale.

The concept of Metaman resonates with our natural awe of the universe and gives humans a place that neither diminishes us nor contradicts humanity’s understanding of the physical realm. In essence, Metaman restores us to a story of the universe that possesses the strength of the ancient myths—their ability to explain the workings of the world and our place in it. We now know the basic outlines of a history of life and the cosmos so rich that it can serve as a powerful modern mythos to orient our lives and our vision of the world.

The network of social, communication, and economic links make individuals, organizations, machines, and even ecosystems across the world ever more dependent on each other, and ever less capable of acting purely on their own without considering potentially faraway consequences.

My idea of freedom has more to do with spontaneous synergistic co-operation over a field of unknown possibilities.

If we do know the method, and we know it infallibly, it ceases to be interesting. There are no surprises left. And the moment the element of surprise is gone, the zest of life has gone.

When I ask myself the seemingly meaningless question what it is like to be nothing and never to have been, I think first of the way my own head looks to my eyes. For, going by the sense of sight alone, there is not, right behind my eyes, a dark place, or a hazy place. There is a positive sensation of nothing—which is quite different from saying that there isn’t anything, because, after all, I see out of this nothingness.

The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and hone our abilities to understand parts, see interconnections, ask “what-if” questions about possible future behaviors, and be creative and courageous about system redesign.

If a society needs a large, powerful law enforcement establishment, then there is something gravely wrong with that society; it must be subjecting people to severe pressures if so many refuse to follow the rules, or follow them only because forced.

St. Paul wrestled with this problem when he saw that the law of Moses made people conscious of right and wrong. “I had not known that there was lust except the law had said, ‘thou shalt not covet’.”.

The words right and left are not in the same language as the words top and bottom. Right and left are words of an inner language; whereas top and bottom are parts of an external language.

The problem with the church and the synagogue is that they’re too talkative. You go to church on Sunday and they lecture God on what he’s supposed to do, as if he didn’t know. Then they lecture the people on what they should do, as if they could or would. And it’s incessant chatter. And I’m trying to persuade the church to cultivate mental silence.