We develop a kind of chronic anxiety about time. We want to be sure more and more, because of our sensitivity to the theme of time. We want to be sure more and more that our future is assured. And for this reason the future becomes of more importance to most human beings than the present. And in this sense we are hooked, taken in, by a māyā, because it is of very little use to us to be able to control and plan the future unless we are capable at the same time of living totally in the present.

Inextricably, we belong in the world.

The system may become a unitary, monolithic organization, or it may be more or less fragmented and consist of a number of organizations coexisting in a relationship that includes elements of both cooperation and competition, just as today the government, the corporations, and other large organizations both cooperate and compete with one another.

Ego is what is destroying us: our inability to displace our loyalty away from the unique locus of space and time represented by our own bodies. You know, community, communalism: these are the things that we fear, that we repress, and that we at the same time struggle to realize. I mean, the collapse of communism on one level was the collapse of a repressive nightmarish paranoid social system. But the dream which lay behind that was a dream of community, of unity, of sisterhood and brotherhood. And the great concern now is that, with the collapse of even a pretense of that position, that we are further fragmented, further atomized into individual competing microbes of greed and need. And this is precisely the attitude which will push us ever closer to species-extinction and to global ruin.

Perception is not a passive mirroring of a world outside like a color photograph; rather, incoming informations are, by a creative act, organized into a universe.

Imagine a primitive man who observes from his hiding place how members of a hostile tribe walk in and out of a cave. If three men come into the cave and two go out, he will know that one enemy is still in the cave: this is the work of a model which is built into his brain. But what if twenty enemies enter and nineteen exit? The brain model is of no use. But one can use fingers or pebbles or whatever is at hand to create a model of the enemies in the cave. The man will still use his brain models to perceive enemies as distinct objects in counting, but the representation of situations is now implemented in external material: fingers, pebbles, etc., not in the brain’s stuff. If a tool is a continuation of the human hand, then language is a continuation of the human brain.

What does this situation mean? When you find yourself in that kind of a trap, what’s the meaning of the trap? Why, that’s very simple: if there’s nothing you can do, and also nothing you cannot do about a given situation, it means that “you” are phony. That, in other words, what we call a “separate ego” isn’t there. Of course it can’t do anything, because it is not an agent. And by virtue of the fact that it can’t do anything, equally, it can’t not do anything. It’s completely phony.

The really dangerous people are those who do not recognize that they are thieves—the unfortunates who play the role of the “good guys” with such blind zeal that they are unconscious of any indebtedness to the “bad guys” who support their status.

The new view is entirely different. The fundamental concepts are activity and process. Nature is divisible and thus extensive. But any division, including some activities and excluding others, also severs the patterns of process which extend beyond all boundaries.

On the one hand, there is a way of being so anxious about physical pleasure, so afraid that you won’t make it, that you grab it too hard, that you just have to have that thing! And if you do that, you destroy it completely. And therefore, after every attempt to get it you feel disappointed. You feel empty, you feel something was lost—and therefore you want it again. You have to keep repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, because you never really got there. And it’s this that is the hangup.

You yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing hide-and-seek (off-and-on) with itself. At root, you are the Godhead, for God is all that there is.

The intellectual life, the mental life, of any given organism is simply a node within a huge communication network.

Reality or existence is a multidimensional and interwoven system of varying spectra of vibrations, and man’s five senses are attuned only to very small bands of these spectra. That sounds very profound and may even mean nothing at all, but in reading it one should attend to the sound of the words rather than their meaning. Then you will get my point.

Societies and economies are as surely subject to evolutionary pressures as biological organisms. Failing social systems eventually wither and die, and are replaced by more successful competitors, and those that can sustain the most rapid expansion dominate sooner or later.

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.

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.

Worry is preposterous. You don’t know enough to worry, you know? Do liver cells worry? Do skin cells worry? It’s just a complete waste of metabolic energy. The better thing is to function well in place, and then to wonder, you know? Wonder is sort of worry without animal anxiety, but it’s living in the light of non-closure. We’re not going to get this thing wrestled into a box. Not positivism, not Islam, not the Kabbalah. No, no—all these things are very good tries, nice efforts. We set them on their pedestals in a long row in the museum of noetic good tries, but it isn’t in that. It’s in the moment; in the recapturing of direct experience.

If a global Web mind comes about, it will clearly link humans together in a new way, leading to some kind of different and more intelligently structured social order.

Gurdjieff once said that if anything would possibly save mankind from its idiocy, it would be the clearest possible recognition by every individual that he and all others around him are most certainly going to die.

What the historical task consists of is humanity turning itself inside out, and .

But you see what’s happened: the thing has become radial instead of addressed to a throne. The picture is: the deity—in other words, the divine point—is moving into the center. Where is that? “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” You see? Instead of being something “out there.”

The ultimate principle of evolution does not seem to be adaptation, but transformation and the creative diversification of evolution.

Egoism and alter-egoism (or the idolatrous service of individuals, groups, and causes with which we identify ourselves so that their success flatters our own ego) cut us off from the knowledge and experience of reality. Nor is this all; they cut us off also from the satisfaction of our needs and the enjoyment of our legitimate pleasures.

The shock of recognition. In the form of everything most other, alien, and remote—the ever-receding galaxies, the mystery of death, the terrors of disease and madness, the foreign-feeling, gooseflesh world of sea monsters and spiders, the queasy labyrinth of my own insides—in all these forms I have crept up on myself and yelled “Boo!” I scare myself out of my wits, and, while out of my wits, cannot remember just how it happened.