The idea of real democracy is as threatening to the politicians of this country as it is to the Chinese leadership. I mean, they do not want the will of the people to be expressed. But I think as we cohere into a single organism, there will be less and less need for these eighteenth-century institutions that we have put in place and maintain with the power of the gun.

If you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart. To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.

We believe, then, that the mind controls the body, not that the body controls itself through the mind. Hence the ingrained prejudice that the mind should be independent of all physical aids to its working—despite microscopes, telescopes, cameras, scales, computers, books, works of art, alphabets, and all those physical tools apart from which it is doubtful whether there would be any mental life at all. At the same time there has always been at least an obscure awareness that in feeling oneself to be a separate mind, soul, or ego there is something wrong. Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature.

Putting our technology into our brains isn’t about whether it’s good or bad to become cyborgs. It’s that we are cyborgs and we will continue to be cyborgs—so it probably makes sense to upgrade ourselves from primitive, low-bandwidth cyborgs to modern, high-bandwidth cyborgs.

In our time, a revolution has begun—a revolution perhaps as significant as the evolution of DNA and nervous systems and the invention of writing. Direct communication among billions of human beings is now made possible by computers and satellites. The potential for a global intelligence is emerging, linking all the brains on Earth into a planetary consciousness.

We can envisage a world whose constantly increasing ‘leisure’ and heightened interest would find their vital issue in fathoming everything, trying everything, extending everything; a world in which giant telescopes and atom smashers would absorb more money and excite more spontaneous admiration than all the bombs and cannons put together; a world in which, not only for the restricted band of paid research-workers, but also for the man in the street, the day’s ideal would be the wresting of another secret or another force from corpuscles, stars, or organised matter; a world in which, as happens already, one gives one’s life to be and to know, rather than to possess.

The Internet looks to me like the backbone of the emergent thing. I mean, the Internet is a huge and not fully comprehended cultural step that we have now totally committed ourselves to. It’s nothing less than the building of a thinking nervous system the size of the entire planet.

This division of labour [...] is that which in the society, as in the animal, makes it a living whole. Scarcely can I emphasize enough the truth that in respect of this fundamental trait, a social organism and an individual organism are entirely alike.

The changes that we have to bring about are going to require an awesome amount of human energy. We have to be intensely devoted to the natural world in order to save the life systems that are now threatened. Everything is to be done, all the professions have to be readjusted. And we have to begin by what I would identify as thinking of the human as species, and we have to find our role as species among species, and to ask not what kind of world we want, but what kind of a world does the natural world want to be? What does the Earth want to be? And how do we help fulfill that role? Because we fit into that, rather than the world fitting into our plans.

Evolution takes on a new character: it becomes primarily a psychosocial process, based on the cumulative transmission of experience and its results, and working through an organised system of awareness, a combined operation of knowing, feeling and willing. In man, at least during the historical and proto-historical periods, evolution has been characterised more by cultural than by genetic or biological change.

After a while you’ve accumulated all these memories, and they’re like mystery stories: you’ve got a shelf of mystery stories and you’ve read all of them. You want a surprise! You want a new situation; one where you don’t know what the outcome’s going to be. It’s part of the game rules thing. When we know the outcome of a game for certain, we cancel it and begin a new one in which the outcome is not certain. That’s what we want.

I don’t think we can make a successful experiment of that kind until we have a changed sense of our own identity. If you force the Marxist experiment upon people, it will be forcing a communal style of life upon people who are not ready for it, and therefore there will be something strained and false about it.

I wonder if competition is really basic to human beings. There are societies, like the Eskimo, where you don’t have this competitive spirit, where you have a high degree of cooperation. We might not have had any kind of society or culture at all if we hadn’t been hunters, because this was the first time organisms had to cooperate.

The more we tend to live in a world of thought, the more we tend to live in an abstract world that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature.

Consciousness and complexity, therefore, are two aspects of one and the same reality—the centre—depending on whether we a adopt a viewpoint outside or inside ourselves.

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery.

You finally figure out that it’s only the clock that’s going around… it’s doing its thing, but you—you’re sitting here right now, always.

Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.

Today’s society tries to socialize us to a greater extent than any previous society. We are even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise, how to make love, ow to raise our kids, and so forth.

There is the entire universe concentrating in the depths of our being.

Fundamentally, then, the question arises: where is “there”? Where’s your rush? Where are you going? To what are you progressing? Stop, look, and listen. Because you may be there already.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light.

It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him. And when the soul feels itself on fire for heaven, it still cannot, by itself, see what it lacks. It will see God only if God turns his face towards it: and a man cannot even force another man to do that. And when, finally, the soul has distinguished the burning centre which has been seeking for it, it is powerless to follow up the ray of light that has fallen on it, and cast itself into the source. For it is written: ‘No one can come to me unless I take him and draw him into myself’.

The ego is like a calcareous tumor on the personality of each of us. This tumor must be psycholytically removed. It must be dissolved. Not that we must have no ego—after all, when you take someone to dinner, you want to know whose mouth to put food in. But a big ego that flowers out beyond the operational need to identify with a single body is an entirely maladaptive response—and we are sick with it, through, through, and through.