The artist-scientist rearranged the living environment in ways that technologically increased the human advantage.

The fact of the matter is the following: certain pieces of matter seem to be associated with consciousness.

When the intellectual élite, the thinkers and leaders, see in man nothing but an overgrown rat—and manipulate him accordingly and successfully—then it is time to be alarmed. A low in the spiritual barometer has been reached which can only predict hurricane and impending disaster.

The concentration of a conscious universe would be unthinkable if it did not reassemble in itself all consciousnesses as well as all the conscious; each particular consciousness remaining conscious of itself at the end of the operation, and even (this must absolutely be understood) each particular consciousness becoming still more itself and thus more clearly distinct from others the closer it gets to them.

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.

Then there is a curious flip. The individual (who has always felt himself to be the tiny little thing on the end of the big determining process) suddenly goes bllwwwp! Have you watched, sometimes, a tiny little piece of mercury coming nearer and nearer to a large piece of mercury? There’s a sudden moment when they touch each other, and bllwwwp! The little thing vanishes into the big one almost more dramatically than a drop into the ocean. In this case that I’m talking about it isn’t that the individual organism vanishes; the individual human being doesn’t vanish. But he experiences no longer a passive relationship to the world. He simply sees that all that he is and all that he ever was was something that the entire process was doing.

The sense of “I,” which should have been identified with the whole universe of your experience, was instead cut off and isolated as a detached observer of that universe.

The much wider notion of ecology, in contrast, includes all co-operative processes which take part in a self-organizing system which in turn is composed of biological self-organizing systems. The term “co-operative” is viewed here from the angle of the overall system and includes competition and predator-prey relationships although it would be difficult for the affected individuals to recognize the co-operative aspect. Both sociobiology and ecology are thus characterized by a minimum of two semantic levels, the level of the individual organisms on the one hand and the level of the macrosystem on the other. The number of semantic levels may, of course, be higher than two if the macrosystem differentiates further.

Any boundary we could draw around a social system will be porous or fuzzy. The only way to fulfill the requirement of organizational closure is to consider global society as a whole as an autopoietic system.

We value a free democratic society not because it is free of control hierarchies—it has at least as many as a totalitarian society—but because the character of control is different.

There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as one of these three drugs. If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an affront to the dignity of the eye and the telephone to the dignity of the ear. Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge. They provide the raw materials of wisdom, and are useful to the extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into the whole pattern of his behavior and the whole system of his knowledge.

I have never seen a truly superior person, I don’t believe. And if I have, they were so humble and self-effacing that they never would have claimed that superiority as their own. If somebody tells you they’re a superior person—my god, they’re automatically to be taken off the active list. That alone screws the pooch right there!

New scientific developments have done away with rigid, mechanistic views of organisms. When studying living systems, biologists no longer focus on the static structures of their anatomy, but on the multitude of interacting processes that allow the organism to adapt to an ever changing environment.

There could be no question that it was Nature’s own plan to provide all land-walking mammals with two pairs of legs, evenly distributed along their lengthy trunk heavily weighted with a head at the end. This was the amicable compromise made with the earth when threatened by its conservative downward force, which extorts taxes for all movements. The fact that man gave up such an obviously sensible arrangement proves his inborn mania for repeated reforms of constitution, for pelting amendments at every resolution proposed by Providence.

Man is a meeting-place for the interplay of forces from all quarters of the universe.

This thing that we fancy ourselves to be simply is a figure of thought or a figure of speech, and is not there at all. And the only reason why this makes us feel astounded and bothered and unbelieving is the momentum of a habit of thought.

All constant stimulations of consciousness become unconscious. And when we take it as a matter of course to have certain comforts, then we switch the level on which we worry. When you solve a whole set of problems, people find new ones to worry about. And after a while you begin to get that haven’t-we-been-here-before? feeling.

If you do something in the spirit of non-achievement, there is a good quality in it. So just to do something without any particular effort is enough.

Just as an infant must wake up and learn from experience the nature of this world, so likewise a person at the moment of consciousness expansion must wake up in this new brilliant world and become familiar with its own peculiar conditions.

Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view—the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.

The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe clashes with his society’s concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will be congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived, by chance or by some such discipline as Yoga or Zen meditation, at a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own scientists know to be true in theory. For the ecologist, the biologist, and the physicist know (but seldom feel) that every organism constitutes a single field of behavior, or process, with its environment. There is no way of separating what any given organism is doing from what its environment is doing, for which reason ecologists speak not of organisms in environments but of organism-environments. Thus the words “I” or “self” should properly mean what the whole universe is doing at this particular “here-and-now” called John Doe.

None of us are brief island existences, but forms and expressions of one and the same eternal “I am” waving in different ways, such that, whenever this is realized to be the case, we wave more harmoniously with other waves.

It’s going to be playing itself to pieces. In other words, it’s going to look like the end of the world. More and more it is looking like the end of the world. But the metaphor that seems to have the heart-thing in it, and to put it across to people, is to say that it’s like a birth. If you had never seen someone give birth, and you came around a corner and were confronted with this phenomenon, it reeks of medical emergency. There’s moaning and groaning, and blood is being shed, and people are thrashing around. So then you would conclude there was a problem. It would take a real leap of faith to embrace this as a wonderful occasion and a great natural step forward. And that’s the planetary situation that we’re in. I mean, we’re in the birth canal of a new ontological order for mankind, and the cheerful amniotic oceans of a planetary past with an endless frontier and endless exploitable resources and mineral wealth and all that, that’s all gone now. Now the walls are closing in. We’re suffocating, we’re strangling, and we’re being massaged toward—we don’t know what. The end of the world is all anybody can think. Well, imagine a fetus trying to anticipate his future career as stockbroker or Indian chief from the point of view of the birth canal. It just means that this phase of the career of intelligence on this planet is closing. Why shouldn’t it be brief? It has been so brief all along. Processes have been happening faster and faster. Why should we have supposed that we would be exempt from this rule of accelerating process?

This level of human life may also be seen to be just as marvelous and uncanny as the great universe itself. This feeling may become particularly acute when the individual ego tries to fathom its own nature, to plumb the inner sources of its own actions and consciousness. For here it discovers a part of itself—the inmost and greatest part—which is strange to itself and beyond its understanding and control. Odd as it may sound, the ego finds that its own center and nature is beyond itself. The more deeply I go into myself, the more I am not myself, and yet this is the very heart of me. Here I find my own inner workings functioning of themselves, spontaneously, like the rotation of the heavenly bodies and the drifting of the clouds. Strange and foreign as this aspect of myself at first seems to be, I soon realize that it is me, and much more me than my superficial ego.