When this kind of experience happens, you discover that what you are is no longer this sort of isolated center of action and experience locked up in your skin. The teacher has asked you to produce that thing, to show it to him genuine and naked, and you couldn’t find it. So it isn’t there! And when you see clearly that it isn’t there, you have a new sense of identity. And you realize that what you are is, as I said, the whole world of nature doing this.

A permanent peace cannot be prepared by threats, but only by the honest attempt to create mutual trust. One should think that the wish to create a decent form of life on this planet and to avert the danger of unspeakable destruction would tame the passions of responsible men. You cannot rely on that, my young friends. May you succeed in activating the young generation in this sense, so that it will strive for a policy of peace on a grand scale. Thus you can not only defend yourself successfully, but you can serve your country and your descendants in a degree as was not given to any previous generation.

I’ve sometimes suggested that all we are is an elaborate system of tubes, and the object of these tubes is to put things in at one end and let them out at the other, and enjoy that. Enjoy it so much that you like other tubes, and you make connections with those tubes in such a way that you get more tubes. Now, these tubes have ganglia at each end, the top end, called a brain. And the point of that ganglion is to be a very sensitive, cunning little thing that finds out where there are things to eat. So they keep reproducing each other. And so the whole of life becomes the flow of a stuff through a tube. Get that through, and get it going faster, get more of it going through. Get more of it. And don’t let it foul things up as it goes through. Everything, as it goes through a tube, tends to wear the tube out. So the tube tries not to be worn out by the stuff going through it so as to keep the sensation going on.

If we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

It’s in the biblical tradition—all the way; in Christianity and in Islam as well—this business of not being with nature. And we speak with a sort of derogation of the “nature religions.” You see, with that fall in the garden [of Eden], nature was regarded as corrupt. There’s a myth for you that corrupts the whole world for us. And every spontaneous act is sinful, because nature is corrupt and has to be corrected, must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization, a totally different way of living according to your myth as to whether nature is fallen or whether nature is itself a manifestation of divinity. And the spirit being the revelation of the divinity that’s inherent in nature.

As a product of human activity, civilization is part of the so-called natural world, not separate from it.

What’s happening is that so much power is being given to man (or taken by man) from the universe through the power of scientific understanding that we are becoming the masters of the planetary destiny whether we want to be or not.

It is photosynthesis which transforms the biosphere into a system which is open with respect to its energy exchange, if generally not with respect to matter and information if we neglect meteorites and the already-mentioned “panspermia” hypothesis of spore transfer across cosmic space. This openness makes it possible to obtain free energy from solar radiation and to export the accruing entropy with waste-heat radiation into space. The atmosphere acts like a buffer system which stores heat and which regulates the waste-heat radiation in such a way that there are no extremal temperature differences. Might it then not be also possible that the entire biosphere together with the atmosphere acts as an autopoietic system which organizes and regulates itself?

What is the result of human works if not to create in and through each of us a supremely original center in which the universe uniquely reflects itself? And these centers are our very selves and personalities. Resonance to the All: an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Physical substance and/or energy was itself the product of action, that ultimate totality whose division produces substance and uses it as a vehicle. So the source of the faith in what is beyond oneself is a timeless overview, the same dynamic orientation that has pushed the physical vehicle through its development and that has guided our steps up the ladder of being since the universe first came into existence.

What you call as “within,” or what you call as “me,” is an entire universe. And that’s the only universe you’ve experienced.

Life is not an accident in the Material Universe, but the essence of the phenomenon.

As a global society possessing, you know, DNA sequencers and thermonuclear delivery systems and so forth and so on, we cannot have the luxury of an unconscious mind. That’s something that may or may not have some appropriateness if you’re hunting woolly mastodons and that sort of thing. But an integrated global culture cannot have the luxury of a large portion of its mind inaccessible to itself and somehow occluded. And apparently this is being eliminated. Technology, the evolution of languages, and so forth have taken a turn toward outing the unconscious.

The apparent universe is a dream-structure in-formed by Subject, and therefore can be nothing but I-subject.

It’s not only so-called mystics and devotees of oriental religions who feel that there is something a little wrong or unnatural about our ordinary way of feeling ourselves and the surrounding world. For the psychologist as well as the mystic may easily hit upon the idea that human beings are bedeviled by a fundamental twist of perception, a distortion of their whole feeling of life, which lies at the root of a large constellation of moral, psychological, and spiritual problems.

We have the technological ability, the financial punch—even at this late date in the mismanaged republican game—to change the world. What we seem to lack is the means, the ability, the chutzpah (whatever it is) to change our minds. We must change our minds. Each and every one of us.

Though for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of fact never static: they are always processes or parts of processes. The different branches of science combine to demonstrate that the universe in its entirety must be regarded as one gigantic process, a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence and organisation, which can properly be called a genesis or an evolution.

Nothing lasts, you know? Not your friends, not your enemies. Nothing lasts. And we deny this. And yet, that’s the great psychedelic truth. And if you can face it in every moment and live it, you will have a very, very complete experience of existence. You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and be able to live in the light of its anticipation. And this, I believe, makes for a healthy life full of lots of laughs, and that’s basically what we’re striving for here. The best idea, the truest idea, will feel right.

So are you a head? Or are you just a tail? Do you move backwards or forwards? Which way are you going? See, if you’re leaving your past behind you, it doesn’t drive you. It wells up out of a mysterious present, ever new. This moment is the creation of the universe. It’s starting now!

I think this is part of the fear that attends it. This is why professional people won’t get near this stuff—because what would you do? How would you return to your job in arbitrage if, on a Saturday night, you had a revelation of the real meaning of money? You know, you could blow the whole apple cart. You could have to change your life, God forbid. People are afraid of this.

This next evolutionary step would signify the transition to a galactic superorganism. The galaxy would become its equivalent of conscious. With this might come the emergence of a sixth level of evolution, one as different from the Gaiafield as the Gaiafield is from consciousness, consciousness from life, and life from matter.

At one level man experiences freedom of choice; he feels himself to be a free agent seeking order and harmony. But at a deeper level, aware of more, he knows himself to be less than free, the instrument of forces greater than himself. There is no contradiction here. The old antithesis of free will and necessity vanishes in the hierarchical view of man. The “higher” levels of the mind express more specialized factors, the “lower” more general. At one level he experiences freedom of choice, but when he becomes aware of the deepest level of all, he loses free will and experiences the bliss of enjoying and serving a pervasive unity. For joy is simply vitality without discord.

The secret is that “other” eventually turns out to be you. I mean, that’s the element of surprise in life: when suddenly you find the thing most alien. We say now: what is most alien to us? Go out at night and look at the stars, and realize that they are millions and millions and billions of miles away. Vast conflagrations out in space. And you can lie back and look at that. Whew! Say, “Well! Surely I hardly matter. I’m just a tiny, tiny little peekaboo on this weird spot of dust called Earth. And all that going on out there. Billions of years before I was born. Billions of years after I will die.” And nothing seems stranger to you than that, more different from you. But there comes a point (if you watch long enough) when you’ll say, “Why, that’s me!” It’s the “other” that is the condition of your being yourself, as the back is the condition of being the front. And when you know that, you know you never die.

We will be the first human generation ever to witness a major change in collective humanity with a time span the order of magnitude of a single human lifetime.