We are asking if we could think together freely: you letting go [of] all your experiences, your conclusions, your desires, prejudices, and so on—putting them aside so that, together, we can think. Will you do that?

I praise chaos, because I think the main thing working to recreate a new world is the impossibility of controlling the old world. I love it when they say it’s moving too fast. I love it because I know it means that they cannot get a hold on it. I mean, can you imagine trying to be the CIA and trying to control the situation in East Germany? I mean, you just throw up your hands and walk away—which is what we want you to do—and then, lo and behold, it flowers according to its own dynamics. Right now the world is moving faster than the meddlers can meddle, and that’s why it has this wonderfully fecund and optimistic aura to it.

We need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted.

Our moral psychology is the societal equivalent of cancer-suppressing mechanisms in multicellular organisms. The coercive side of morality is required to suppress the potential for disruptive self-seeking behaviors within groups. Once the coercive side is established, then it becomes safe for group members to freely help each other without fear of exploitation.

We think we are secure when we pursue an ideal—however false it is, however unreal it is, which has no validity—it gives a certain sense of purpose. And that sense of purpose gives a certain quality of assurance, satisfaction, security.

If you play in order to do better work, you’re not really playing. Because play is the kind of activity which does not have an ulterior motive. It is the kind of activity that is done for its own sake.

The human subject is more important than anything else. All the greatest doctrines, religious or political, have found their ultimate sanction in the quality of personal experience and aspiration, for in this lies the dignity and uniqueness of man and his ability to transcend himself. This is the treasure we must restore and preserve. Any doctrine which seeks to override or neglect this is the enemy of our humanity.

The most amazing advances of science and technology are no more than a preparation and a beginning. When all is said and done, the future of the world depends entirely upon the emergence in us of a moral consciousness of the atom, culminating in the appearance of a universal love.

How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all? Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of a limited region of matter, the body. (Consider the changes of mind during the development of the body, as puberty, ageing, dotage, etc., or consider the effects of fever, intoxication, narcosis, lesion of the brain and so on.) Now, there is a great plurality of similar bodies. Hence the pluralization of consciousnesses or minds seems as very suggestive hypothesis. Probably all simple, ingenuous people, as well as the great majority of Western philosophers, have accepted it.

Why is it that every generation—before it gets this lesson of the past—why is it that each generation harasses and persecutes its gentlest, wisest, and holiest men; exactly those men that succeeding generations will revere? The answer to this question has nothing to do with intelligence or social prejudice or conservatism. The answer is neurological. The nervous system of the adult human being is so set up that it registers intense neurological pain when confronted with an idea or a method which liberates man from his addiction to symbols, from his addiction to the current tribal symbol system.

I’m afraid very much that our selection of virtues may not work. It may be like, for example, this new kind of high-yield grain which is made and which is becoming ecologically destructive. When we interfere with the processes of nature and breed efficient plants and efficient animals, there’s always some way in which we have to pay for it. And I can well see that eugenically-produced human beings might be dreadful. We could have a plague of virtuous people. You realize that? Any animal, considered in itself, is virtuous. It does its thing. But in crowds they’re awful—like a crowd of ants or locusts on the rampage. They’re all perfectly good animals, but it’s just too much. I could imagine a perfectly pestiferous mass of a million saints.

You will realize that the infinite nothingness into which you will disappear when you die was the same infinite nothingness out of which you came when you were born.

The intelligence of such a Global Brain is collective or distributed: it is not localized in any particular individual, organization, or computer system. It rather emerges from the interactions between all these components.

This is the real secret of life: to be completely engaged with what you’re doing in the here and now—and instead of calling it work, realize that this is play.

Social media doesn’t just amplify political junk food, it plays a role in shaping it. When a new political news story makes waves, thousands of hot takes quickly bubble up. It’s not necessarily the most accurate takes that rise to the topg.18 but those that are most likely to make people click the retweet or share button—those that have the catchiest wording and hit the right emotional buttons. Through an almost evolutionary process, complex topics are dumbed down and packaged into irresistible nuggets for our Primitive Minds.

It’s this little funny microbe—tiny thing, crawling on this little planet that’s way out somewhere—who has the ingenuity, by nature of this magnificent organic structure, to evoke the whole universe out of what would otherwise be mere quanta. There’s jazz going on. But, you see, this little ingenious organism is not merely some stranger in this. This little organism, on this little planet, is what the whole show is growing there, and so realizing its own presence.

The new dispensation in the sciences, I think, can be placed in all its manifestations under the umbrella of the idea that what is important about nature is that it is information. And the real tension is not between matter and spirit or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense, if you will. Nonsense does not serve the purposes of organizational appetites—whether those organizational appetites are being expressed in a chemical system, a molecular system, a social system, a climaxed rainforest, or whatever.

This is what all societies end up building—whether they build it out of mushrooms, morning glories, and tobacco smoke, or silicon, copper, gold, and plastic, you know? Everybody ends up erecting a cybernetic global network of information for transferring the information that they have culturally validated and seek to preserve.

The unit of selection—that is driving the dominant feature for sapiens—the unit of selection is a group. That’s actually a really important thing to think about as opposed to that the unit of selection is an individual, because we have such an individualistically-focused culture today, and we think in terms of individual focus way excessively to the actual evolutionary fitness of an individual outside of a tribe.

Language is some kind of enterprise of human beings that is not finished; that we have now left the grunts and the digs of the elbow somewhat in the dust, but the most articulate, brilliantly pronounced and projected English or French or German or Chinese is still a poor carrier of our intent, a very limited bandwidth for the intense compression of data that we are trying to put across to each other.

You must’ve noticed this: that the world is very heavily designed in a way that it never was before.

The point of spirituality is not to have a variety of extraordinary experiences. The extraordinary experiences just opens you to the fact that this experience also is a kind of extraordinary experience.

That the information is multiplying at that rate during just one lifetime indicates that something is going on here right now that is utterly unprecedented, and we’re in such indication of acceleration of experiences of human beings; the integration of the accelerated, the experienced, to produce awarenesses that are indicative of humanity going through some very, very important kind of transition into some kind of new relationship to Universe, I’d say. The kind of acceleration that would occur after the child has been formed in the womb, taking the nine months, and then suddenly begins to issue from the womb out into an entirely new world.

It’s like I would say to you, “Now, look, if you come here tonight at exactly midnight and put your hands on this stage, you can wish and have granted any wish you want to—provided you don’t think of a green elephant.” And so everybody will come, they’ll put their hands here, and they will be very careful not to think about a green elephant. Well, now, do you see the point? That everybody—if we transfer this to the dimension of spirituality where the highest ideal is to be unselfish, to let go of one’s self—when you are trying to be unselfish, you’re doing it for a selfish reason. You can’t be unselfish by a decision of the will any more than you can decide not to think of a green elephant!