The idea of liberation automatically inhibits the simple realisation that we are free.

Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for a sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific Islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go in the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured in your cup by a South American. Or maybe you want tea: that’s poured in your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured in your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer—not to mention the baker! And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning you are dependent on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured. It is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.

It is most reasonable to begin somewhere with an island of functional sanity and let its pattern spread according to its own merits, neither coerced nor coercing.

Now is what there is and all that there is. We could say that the past flows back from now like the wake from the prow of a ship, and then, just like the wake, vanishes. As the wake doesn’t drive the ship, the past doesn’t propel, or move, the present—unless you, here and now, want to insist that it does, and so give yourself a perpetual alibi for every kind of irresponsibility.

That’s what I have: what to do if the end of time is postponed?

The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.

Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and of the world.

The time has come when psycho-analysis must study each man’s trans-individual aspirations and so occupy itself (as a problem not of healing, but of engineering) with the working out of an energetics of man (a psych-energetics), on the scale of, and for application by, a zoological group which is in the process of planetary totalization.

We developed language, symbolic representation, dance, theater, so forth and so on, and we acquired and empowered the tremendous imagination that has allowed us to build the cultures that we see around us. That kind of power is only safe in the hands of collective community-minded creatures, and in the hands of ego-driven creatures it leads straight to Auschwitz and the hydrogen bomb—as it did.

What does “inform yourself” mean? It means transcend and mistrust ideology. Go for direct experience. What do you think when you face the waterfall? What do you think when you have sex? What do you think when you take psilocybin? Everything else is unconfirmable rumor, useless, probably lies. So liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.

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.

What is man’s purpose? To advance and preserve novelty. This is an ethical position. It means you don’t replace rainforests with pastures. You don’t censor books. You don’t lean on people who make gender choices different from yours. No, the purpose of being a human is to complexify reality even more: to hand on a more diverse, more complicated, more multiphasic universe to our children.

If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it.

The enormous surplus of free energy released by the in-folding of the Noösphere is destined by a natural evolutionary process to flow into the construction and functioning of what I have called its “Brain.” As in the case of all the organisms preceding it, but on an immense scale, humanity is in process of “cerebralizing” itself. And our proper biological course, in making use of what we call our leisure, is to devote it to a new kind of work on a higher plane: that is to say, to a general and concerted effort of vision. The Noösphere, in short, is a stupendous thinking machine.

The point of it is itself! It has no point beyond itself. It’s there. It’s arrived. It’s in a complete present, it is here and now. And that’s what it’s all about.

Can you change your state of consciousness so that you don’t any longer have to feel that you are an isolated island of sensitivity locked up in a bag of skin? Could you come to feel that you are really, deep down, simply a particular expression of everything that there is?

What writing allows is expansion of the database, because things are not dependent on the wetware of human memory to survive from generation to generation. Suddenly the mush of brain is replaced by the durability of wood and stone and clay, and these things then become the medium upon which the primary database of the culture is being carried forward.

Each one of us is perforce linked by all the material, organic, and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him. Not only is he caught up in a network, he is carried along, too, by a stream.

Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is candy which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.

When I was a minister, I used to tell the students at Northwestern University, “So there’s going to be a celebration of the Holy Communion 7 o’clock next Sunday. 11 o’clock.” And I said, “Now look: I said celebration. And if you come here because you think you ought to come, we don’t want you. Better stay in bed, go for a swim, or something else. But if you want to join with us in this act of celestial whoopee, you’re very welcome.” I came right out and said that, you see—so I had to leave the church. This is the essential thing that we lack. We just don’t have this social institution.

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind.

There is a general law of evolution: ontogenesis (the history of an individual development) roughly repeats, or recapitulates, phylogenesis (the history of the species). Evolution tends to build on the existing foundation, making only those alterations that are necessary.

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?

We are the bearers of a cosmic responsibility and we respond with a cosmic cowardice that is the original sin. We pretend that our gods are real, we pretend that grace exists. We pretend that the pursuit of happiness is the gift of existence. Reality catches up with us, mandatorily.