Universalism and futurism, combining in the perception of a universe which is in process of global growth (evolution). In themselves, these two characteristics constitute by their appearance a great psychological event, since they amount to the acquisition by our experience of two new dimensions. But they do more: by their nature, they define a religion, since the ‘religious’ appears, by definition, as soon as the world is seen in its totality and in its consummation in the future (‘faith’).

Nothing could stop humanity in its advance to social unification, towards the development of machinery and automation (liberators of the spirit), towards ‘trying all’ and ‘thinking all’ right to the very end.

The essence of great experience is penetration into the unknown, the unexperienced.

What prevents you from knowing yourself as all and beyond all, is the mind based on memory. It has power over you as long as you trust it; don’t struggle with it; just disregard it. Deprived of attention, it will slow down and reveal the mechanism of its working. Once you know its nature and purpose, you will not allow it to create imaginary problems.

And then he says, “Just as those people whom you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been an agent in the structuring of other lives.” And the whole thing gears together like one big symphony. He says, “everything influencing and structuring everything else.” And he said, “It’s as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer, in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, and so everything links to everything else, moved out of the will in nature.”

Apparently, the way the universe works is upon a platform of previously achieved complexity—chemical, electrical, social, biological… whatever—new forms of complexity can be built that cross these ontological boundaries. In other words, what I mean by that is that biology is based on complex chemistry, but it is more than complex chemistry. Social systems are based on the organization that is animal life, and yet it is more than animal life.

There is simply no way of getting around all this. The gull can’t really be said to be rapacious or greedy. It’s just that his being alive at all is the same thing as eating crabs. Sea birds are transformations of fish; men are transformations of wheat, steers, and chickens. A love for the food is the very agony of the food. To object to this inseparability of pleasure and pain, life and death, is to object to existence. But, of course, we cannot help objecting when our time comes. Objecting to pain is pain.

You are continuous with this environment. And although we have been habituated to looking upon ourselves as separate things, we are no more separate from what’s going on around us than each of these waves, here, are separate from the ocean, or that Mount Tamalpais is separate from the planet Earth. We have great freedom of movement. So do the waves. So do the gulls floating in the air. So do the trees waving in the wind. We have a larger degree of freedom than that because we are more volatile. But we are just as much waves in the total process—it depending upon us, and we in turn depending upon it.

The whole thrust of electronics is to make inanimate objects immediately responsive to our thoughts.

Consciousness is the characteristic of the structure of the social system; therefore it is not possible to regard consciousness as some sort of “inner” property of the individual. However, consciousness is not only something general, but every individual also has his personal consciousness. This personal consciousness is not something residing “inside,” but means the personal participation of the individual in the results of common action. Every participating individual realizes some aspect of the general consciousness through his own action. The different individual aspects culminate in the common result and participation in the common results widens the action possibilities and the personal consciousness of the individual.

What evolves in phylogenetic development to higher complexity, is organization—an organization which, in principle, may be realized independently of time and space, as long as the environment is favorable.

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

This whole thing is basically (as we nowadays say) a Gaia system: a total system which is almost as if it were alive.

Even birds know not to foul their nests—how come we don’t know that?

All these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives, and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.

By trying to understand everything in terms of memory, the past, and words, we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view.

Mind is a phenomenon of metabolic activity. So far as we know, where there is not metabolism, there is not consciousness. Even computers—they have to have a flow of electrons in their guts. When there’s no electrons flowing, there’s no computation taking place. Similarly for us: when there is no flow of electrons, no charge transfer, then you’re dead. You know? And there’s no coming back from that. But if you have had children, look what’s happened: half of your information has been kept alive in the non-equilibrium thermodynamic state of the dissipative structure which is the species, you see?

Computing the truth takes valuable resources, such as time and energy; this can favor the evolution of heuristics that cut corners on truth and resources. The desire for social acceptance can lead one to adopt false beliefs as a form of virtue signaling. Strategic lies can be advantageous; the best liars are those who are not aware they are lying.

Democritus introduces the intellect (διάνοια) having an argument with the senses (αίσθήσεις) about what is ‘real.’ The former says: ‘Ostensibly there is colour, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void,’ to which the senses retort: ‘Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.’

The experience itself has very little meaning if, in fact, it is an experience only for an individual or a small group of individuals, isolated from the rest of humanity.

In everyday life one used to speak of man as an individual, living and moving freely about our planet, freely building up his history. Until recently the historians and the students of the humanities, and to a certain extent even the biologists, consciously failed to reckon with the natural laws of the biosphere, the only terrestrial envelope where life can exist. Basically man cannot be separated from it; it is only now that this indissolubility begins to appear clearly and in precise terms before us. He is geologically connected with its material and energetic structure. Actually no living organism exists on earth in a state of freedom. All organisms are connected indissolubly and uninterruptedly, first of all through nutrition and respiration, with the circumambient material and energetic medium. Outside it they cannot exist in a natural condition.

Consciousness is the generalized word that we use for this coordination of complex perception to create a world that draws from the past and builds a model of the future, and then suspends the perceiving organism in this magical moment called the “Now,” where the past is coordinated for the purpose of navigating the future.

Life is the same kind of part of the cosmos as energy and matter.

The richest and most powerful civilization on earth is so preoccupied with saving time and making money that it has neither taste for life nor capacity for pleasure.