Love is self-giving. When you love someone—say, you fall in love with a member of your opposite sex, or whatever, and you got mixed up with someone now—you’ve really committed yourself to heaven only knows what! Because love is a letting go of direct control.

Buddhism has nothing to teach. Nothing whatever. All it has to do is to get rid of illusions, and then the experience happens when the illusions are gone, just like the sun comes out when the clouds go away. But if you try to manufacture the sun before the clouds have gone away—you see what I mean?—and you paint the sun on this side of the clouds, it’s not the real sun. So, in this way, the speculation as such, ideation as such, does not lead to the awakening experience.

That’s what I have: what to do if the end of time is postponed?

All nature aspires for this state of perfect novelty.

The process of evolution, which after ages has reached man, must be realized in its unity with him, though in him it assumes a new value and proceeds to a different path. It is a continuous process that finds its meaning in Man.

The economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race—not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms.

I have described the “waves of organization” which successively enter the human world, orchestrating it ever more fully. Out of the struggle of the individual for physical survival grew social systems which, in turn, made it possible to organize physical relations in a conscious approach, involving human design. Out of the struggle within and between social systems grew cultures which, in turn, provided an ethical roof beneath which to organize social relations in a consciously designed way. Out of the struggle within and between cultures—a struggle of images which man holds of himself, of life styles and world views—grows in our time a feeling for the wholeness of the global mankind process.

I’m not going to take the position that technology is a mistake. I think there could be a new kind of technology, using a new attitude.

It’s a characteristic of consciousness that it ignores stimuli that are constant.

Whether we find it astonishing or whether we find it quite plausible that a small but highly organized group of atoms be capable of acting in this manner, the situation is unprecedented, it is unknown anywhere else except in living matter. The physicist and the chemist, investigating inanimate matter, have never witnessed phenomena which they had to interpret in this way.

A universe totally conscious that its last hiatus, full knowledge and creation, is nondimensional because it is infinitely complex, and not temporal because it is utterly durational.

How far does my very claim to humanity depend upon protecting my own rights as against those of the collective?

The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information. The efficiency of information processing can be increased by lessening the mass of the markers, making them smaller so they can be stored more compactly and transmitted more rapidly and cheaply. Over the centuries engineering progress has altered the mode in markers from stones bearing cuneiform to magnetic tape bearing electrons, and clearly some limit is being approached.

Global integration entails an eventual harmonization of rules.

Never look up to anybody. Never look down on anybody. That’s all you have to do with life. Never look up to anything or anybody, never look down on anything or anybody. Suddenly you will see life just the way it is.

In our ordinary awareness we overlook the connections that go between so-called things and so-called events and make them, actually, nothing but aspects of one event.

The actual world is a process, and that process is the becoming of actual entities.

The technology that is now developing and that will dominate the next decades seems to be in total conflict with traditional and, in the main, momentarily still valid, geographical and political units and concepts. This is the maturing crisis of technology.

Some biologists, indeed, would claim that mind is generated solely by the complexification of certain types of organisation, namely brains. However, such logic appears to me narrow. The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation. Indeed an isolated brain is a piece of biological nonsense, as meaningless as an isolated human individual.

We all have this strange, fascinating thing we carry around, which is the body. And every time we look at the body, every time I move my arm, every time I touch, every time I look and take this glass, this gesture—and it is only within the realm of the bonding experience that this happens, that you have two irreducible facts together, inseparably together. On the one hand, there is the motion of the arm. There is all of the external description that I can do of how this is done. At the same time, and also as part of the data that phenomena is proposing to me, I have my experience of seeing the glass and drinking it. Again, all I’m saying is that these two sets of data need to go together, and they are irreducible.

Something will explode if we persist in trying to squeeze into our old tumble-down huts the material and spiritual forces that are henceforward on the scale of a world.

Is there some method whereby, in our schools, we could produce from the music department, every graduation ceremony, three musicians of the stature of Bach or Mozart? Now, if we knew how to do that, that knowledge would prevent us from being surprised by the work of these people—because we would know how it’s done! And when you know how something is done, it doesn’t surprise you.

The dream of artists, to be able to show the fabric of their dreams and visions, may be fast approaching virtual reality.

The trouble is that most people in the West have been brought up to believe that they’re in this universe as strangers on probation, or as flukes in a system which is fundamentally mindless and mechanical.