In the average church all you get is talk. There’s no meditation, no spiritual discipline. They tell God what to do interminably, as if he didn’t know. And then they tell the people what to do, as if they could or even wanted to. And then they sing religious nursery rhymes. And then, to cap it all, the Roman Catholic Church—which did at least have an unintelligible service; which was, you know, it was real mysterious and suggested vast magic going on—they went and put the thing into bad English. And they took away incense, and they took away—they became a bunch of Protestants, and the thing was just terrible! So now all these Catholics are at loose ends. As Clare Boothe Luce put it—not to be a pun—but she said, you know, “It’s no longer possible to practice contemplative prayer at mass.” Because you’re being advised, exhorted, edified all the time, and it becomes a bore. Think of God listening to all those prayers! I mean, talking about grieving the Holy Spirit! It’s just awful. People have no consideration for God at all!

We are one species. We are star stuff, harvesting starlight.

When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human history—an anomaly held up only by trust, cultural norms, and shared assumptions.

The life of affluence and pleasure requires exact discipline and high imagination. Somewhat as metals deteriorate from “fatigue,” every constant stimulation of consciousness, however pleasant, tends to become boring and thus to be ignored.

The individual is an aperture through which the whole energy of the universe is aware of itself, a vortex of vibrations in which it realizes itself as man or beast, flower or star—not alone, but as central to all that surrounds it. These centers are not, as it may seem, apart from their surroundings, but stand in mutual relationship to them—center to circumference—in the same way as the magnetic poles.

Metaman does “think,” and furthermore its thoughts are becoming increasingly complex. It is intriguing to consider whether one day this giant superorganism will also have a consciousness of its own.

Moral exhortation to the individual and even his personal honesty are patently ineffective; the problem is to expand moral codes to the inclusion of higher social entities and, at the same time, safeguard the individual from being devoured by the social Leviathan.

Cooperative approaches to achieving individual or national goals often turn out to be more beneficial in the long run to all parties than competitive approaches.

Is there still physical evolution to be expected in man, I mean to say relevant changes in our physique that become gradually fixed as inherited features, just as our present bodily self is fixed by inheritance—genotypical changes, to use the technical term of the biologist?

With the shift of emphasis from biotechnology to technology, and from evolution to metaevolution (evolution conscious of itself), one has to expect all sorts of crises and disruptions. Ours is an age of transition handling powers never dreamed of before. So much of today’s turmoil can be optimistically seen as an excruciating invocation of the living upon the non-living in order to make the non-living an “image” of the living.

This is what being psychedelic means: it means you’re more than a surface. You have more to say than “Have a nice day.” You’re there, you know? And a lot of people aren’t. They’re just fulfilling sociological algorithms that are imposed from the top.

The meaning of the somewhat mystical expression, “the whole is more than the sum of parts” is simply that constitutive characteristics are not explainable from the characteristics of isolated parts.

Observe the stages of this differentiation, the levels of abstraction: First, the organism from its environment, and with this knowledge of the environment. Second, the distinction of knowing knowledge from knowledge itself. But in concrete fact all this, like the finger-thumb opposition, is a difference which does not divide. The thumb is not floating in the air alongside the rest of the hand. At their roots both fingers and thumb are joined. And at our roots we are joined to the whole subject of nature. Of course, you might say that nature or the whole universe is nothing but a big abstraction. But tell me, is an orange nothing but an abstraction from its component molecules, skins, segments, fibers and fluids?

What it looks like for an individual is really different than the societal-level outcomes, and the fact that there is—I don’t want to call it cognition or computation; I don’t know what you call it—but there is a process playing out in the dynamics of societies that we are all individual actors in, and we’re not part of that. It requires all of us acting individually, but this higher-level structure is playing out some things, and things are getting solved for it to be able to maintain itself. And that’s the level that our technologies live at. They don’t live at our level. They live at the societal level, and they’re deeply integrated with the social organism, if you want to call it that.

But the truth of the matter is: it all begins here! This is where the creation begins! And you’re doing it and won’t admit it.

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.

There is no inevitability in our lives unless we submit to the idea of inevitability and then give ourselves over to it.

It’s you. It’s us. It’s we. It’s life that’s had that experience.

Science itself, a field of activity par excellence of the neural mind, has fallen into the traps of the limbic brain and in some stubborn cases even into the traps of the reptilian brain by narrowing down to specific teachings and by claiming to represent knowledge exclusively and absolutely. There is no small irony in the fact that “objectivity”-claiming science originates in the most subjective aspect of evolution, namely, the self-reflexive mind.

You can’t do it by yourself. That’s the entire message of the last 10,000 years of human history. The self is insufficient. The ego will not suffice. The only way you’re ever going to get anywhere is: you must humble yourself to the point where you admit that you can’t do it unless you have help from someone.

The concept of self-creation receives emphasis in his later writings to supplant the defunct notion of creation by God, and his repeated references to the big bang acknowledge the source of all of this churning, self-generating, self-creating mystery. The fact that life—and human self-conscious life in particular—has emerged out of the self-generating cosmic laboratory is cause for bottomless wonder and celebration.

Godmanood is to be discovered here and now inwardly.

It’s the idea that a relationship to the vegetable matrix of the planet is what constitutes a Gaian resurgence; that it is plants that regulate the composition of the atmosphere, the temperatures of the oceans, so forth and so on, and that it is our lack of integration into that system that has precipitated the crisis of toxic twentieth-century potlatch civilization.

The sense of an organic interrelation based not merely on our more or less accidental coexistence on the surface of the Earth, or even on our common origin, but on the fact that we represent, all of us together, the front line, the crest of an evolutionary wave still in full flood.