You press your selfishness and you go into this whole question of: what do I really want? Supposing I could have it. Supposing I have all the money, anything I can think of. What is it I’m after? And you explore all the sensations you can imagine—all the delights of pleasure, all the ecstasies, all the drunks, all the orgasms, all the anything you can think of—go right through to the end of it: what is it you’re looking for? You say, “Oh, I want to be flipped!” You know, I want to be let out of myself! Well, when you’re let out of yourself, that’s altruism. He that would save his life shall lose it. He that loses his life—or loosens his life—shall find it. You go one way or the other and it all becomes the same thing.

In the moment of being human we have a unique opportunity to figure things out.

We do not feel what we are doing. Remember? I spoke about the primacy of the felt moment of experience. If we could feel what we are doing, we would stop doing it. But between us and the consequences of our action there are endless veils of political rhetoric, stultification, denial, sedation, intoxication, ideological delusion.

Forgetting renews. And that also is a function of all demolitions, of deaths, of destruction of patterns, of knocking down buildings, of the whole change process in the universe. Because we want to do what we’ve done before over again. Only, if you remember it too often, it’ll become boring. So if you forget, then you can do it again, and it’ll be just as amazing as it was the first time. And so there absolutely has to be a forgettery built into this universe in just the same way and for just the same reasons that there must be an eliminative process in the body as well as an eating process. And both are vitally important.

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

It’s important to go through that state, in a way; important to realize that you don’t know anything. You don’t know what it’s all about. You don’t understand the universe. It’s all incomprehensible. Words and systems were just a way of whistling in the dark. We all whistled in the dark together and agreed that we had the same whistle, and that was great, but we really don’t know anything. Anybody who poses as an authority about anything at all is just making an authoritative noise.

The goal here is not an AI overlord that runs everything, it is: how do computation and intelligence capacities make new collective intelligence possible such that you can have the global coordination to prevent global catastrophic failures, but where that system has checks and balances in it so you don’t have centralized power, coordination, and corruption failures?

You begin to realize it’s a sort of secret that you are willing what happens to you without your will. Because you see that you couldn’t will anything unless there was also that that was other, that you couldn’t will, that was beyond your control. And it begins to dawn. You begin to see the whole thing: that you’re not just something fighting the world all on your little lonesome, but that the whole thing that you think you’re fighting is the other side of you.

For no exact scientific reason, but simply as a result of impression and routine, we have formed the habit of separating the psychic from the material, as if they belonged to two different worlds, the arrangement of individuals and the arrangement of cells; only the latter being regarded as organic and natural, in contrast to the former, which is relegated to the domain of the moral or artificial. Society (human society especially) is a matter for historians and jurists rather than biologists. Is not that what we too often think?

The urge for cosmic connections, for a symbiosis of mankind with life and intelligence beyond our earth, cannot be simply explained away as an “escape from reality.” It reflects the urge to establish a deeper connection with evolution and thus to what we ourselves represent. The extension of our consciousness is self-reference at the same time as it is cosmic reference.

Intelligence is a function of the degree to which you realize that your behavior is one with the behavior of the rest of the world.

Would some form of global self-awareness or consciousness emerge, just as self-awareness and consciousness emerges in biological systems whose brains have reached a certain level of complexity?

If we look for the principal outcome, “Result № 1,” of the ineluctable scientific unification of our intellects during the past century, we must quickly perceive that the gain consists far less in our securing control of any particular source of natural energy than in the general awakening of our consciousness to the vast and extreme organicity of the universe as a whole, considered in terms of its internal forces of development. We see more clearly with every increase in our knowledge that we are, all of us, participants in a process (Cosmogenesis culminating in Anthropogensis) upon which our ultimate fulfillment—one might even say, our beatification—obscurely depends.

The more efficient the intercommunication within a community, the more nearly simultaneous will be the sudden emergence of a new idea from the shared unconscious background.

There’s the individual organism—the whole, total body. And this—if we knew we were this, if we really felt our whole body—we would feel what our whole body actually feels, which is that it’s one with the universe. The body does not exist without its environment. It goes with it, just in the same way as a front goes with a back. We cannot possibly exist without the sun, and the sun cannot exist without the galaxy, and the galaxy cannot exist without the other galaxies. It all goes together. And therefore one might say the sun is as much one’s own internal organ as one’s heart. We are inseparable from all that—just as I said the front is inseparable from a back, or the head side of a coin is inseparable from the tail side. We go with all this. The universe that is said to be outside us is our own extended body.

We talk about virtual realities, designer drugs, downloading ourselves into circuitry, travel through time, disincarnate bodies, cloned identities, gender shifting, point of view shifting—all of these things, this is all about the rules of mind overwhelming the rules of physics. The rules of physics say you are a body, you are on a planet, you have weight, you have momentum, you have specific gravity, you must behave like this and like this and like this, and mind says: no, I want to be pure unleashed conceptuality, I want to be a thought blown in a hyperdimensional wind, I want to move from planet to planet with the twink of an eye, I want to know everything, see everything, be everything, feel everything.

Complexity is explosively affirming its own power to synthesize spirit. The Urban Effect presides over this process of interiorization and sensitization. This genesis of the divine is the tidal wave we are part of and partaker in.

When we move up to higher levels of emergence, where groups of people function like giant organisms, a group’s culture becomes the giant’s personality.

What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. It’s odd. I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened. I just… it’s extraordinary. Extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it. It’s so much larger than me, and life. And it hasn’t got anything to do with the little green planet, the blue orb. It has to do with the enormity, and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death, and then oh my God!

The “you” that you imagine to be capable of transforming yourself doesn’t exist. In other words, an ego, an “I” separate from my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences (who is supposed to be in control of me), cannot control them because it isn’t there. And as soon as you understand that, things will be vastly improved.

The connexity of existence is of the essence of understanding.

Here, then, you see, is the view of the individual no longer separated from everything that happens by being defined as an individual event.

I was so caught in individualism that I was losing my sense of community.

History is a dysfunctional state of some sort. History is an act of brutish insensitivity only achievable through an act of self-limitation from the demands and the inspiration of nature.