Bear always in mind that the doctrines of these ancient religions are the symbols of inward, personal experiences rather than attempts to describe metaphysical truth. The important thing is not whether the doctrine contains an objective statement of fact about the universe; it is to discover what inward experience, what state of mind or attitude to life, would lead human beings to think in that way. For the wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief.

When history becomes a science, life will be art.

There are models that win in the short term, but that actually move towards comprehensively worse realities and/or even self-extinction; evolutionary cul-de-sacs. And I would argue that humanity is in the process of pursuing evolutionary cul-de-sacs, where the things that look like they are forward are forward in a way that does not get to keep forwarding. And at the heart of that is optimizing for narrow goals, and at the heart of that is perceiving reality in a fragmented way.

We must discover by trying it out whether the ordering tendency in organic nature and in the human organism and mind, properly exploited, is not more helpful than God ever was. If only simple ideas can save the world, here is one that might. It has great power.

If we make ourselves unfit for the community of life, then the community of life is going to reject us.

The ideas of individual freedom and fatalism rest on the same assumption—that man is separate, the boss or the puppet. In my view, he cannot act with wisdom unless he feels that what he does and what nature does are one and the same.

The notion of a separate thinker, of an “I” distinct from the experience, comes from memory and from the rapidity with which thought changes.

It’s this idea, or this experience, that there is a state in which you feel that you know everything that can be known, and that, in your normal human mind, you’ve only forgotten. You’ve forgotten that you are the entire universe.

If you’re perfectly honest about loving yourself (and you don’t pull any punches, you don’t pretend that you’re anything other than exactly what you are), you suddenly come to discover that the self you love—if you really go into it—is the universe.

The extension of the human race is extraordinary, so extraordinary that it requires all the destructive force exercised by habit on the brightness of our impressions to prevent us from appreciating the miraculous element in the spectacle of humanity’s ascent through life, the spectacle of the human tide covering the Earth.

Only one reality seems to survive and be capable of succeeding and spanning the infinitesimal and the immense: energy—that floating, universal entity from which all emerges and into which all falls back as into an ocean; energy, the new spirit; the new god. So, at the world’s Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal.

For the animal to be happy it is enough that this moment be enjoyable. But man is hardly satisfied with this at all. He is much more concerned to have enjoyable memories and expectations—especially the latter. With these assured, he can put up with an extremely miserable present. Without this assurance, he can be extremely miserable in the midst of immediate physical pleasure.

It is not, you see, that your own individual organism is the puppet of everything else, responding to it as a billiard ball responds to being hit by a cue. It is not also that you, as an individual, are an independent source of energy which pushes the world around. Both these views are based on a false assumption that the individual organism is really separate from the world; that’s the false assumption.

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.

Those who make money with money deliberately keep it scarce. Money is not wealth. Wealth is the accomplished technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growful needs of life. Money is only an expediency-adopted means of interexchanging disparately sized, nonequatable items of real wealth.

The whole relationship of trees and birds and worms and bees and so on is a network. And every aspect of the network—you might say every part of it—depends for its existence on every other part. That means, you see, that the network as a whole is a single organism. Just as, in your own physical body (and you call yourselves a single organism), there are billions of creatures of very different kinds, and they’re all running around inside your blood stream and doing their stuff. They’re having battles, love affairs, all kinds of things. And this huge variety of stuff going on constitutes your life as an individual. And so, in turn, you are some kind of a little wiggle in some other sort of stream which constitutes a larger organism yet.

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.

See, all that’s holding together the illusion of the historical world is our inability to communicate with each other. Here is somebody over here. They are working on data encryption. Here is somebody who’s working on nanotechnology. Here’s starflight. Here, longevity. Here, cures for viral diseases. Well, none of these people talk to each other. None of them know of each other’s existence. And yet, one by one, they will arrive at their goals and this will all be fed together into a civilization that nobody is managing and nobody can imagine.

Certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

You remember what happened in the Garden of Eden? God set a trap by saying: there is that specific tree, and you mustn’t eat the fruit of it. If he had really not wanted them to eat the fruit, he wouldn’t have said anything about it. But by drawing attention to it in this way, it was obvious they were going to eat it.

I’m not trying to say that there is no value of any kind whatsoever in the science of dietetics, and that one ought not to consider the matter of the nutritive components of food, its vitamins, and so on and so forth. What I am going to say is that that additional knowledge about eating is really of no use to us at all if the only use it has is to give us a future. The point is: a future is of no use to people who are not able to appreciate the useless. A future has no value if it is only survival value.

The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense (largely justified) that change is imposed on him, whereas the nineteenth-century frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his own choice.

To construct a God in the human image is objectionable only to the extent that we have a poor image of ourselves, for example, as egos in bags of skin. But as we can begin to visualize man as the behavior of a unified field—immensely complex and comprising the whole universe—there is less and less reason against conceiving God in that image.

We are absorbed with occurrences at our own scale, not with those at the global level of the superorganism. With a bit of effort, though, we can transcend our relatively limited vision and life span to view the large, integrated patterns that make Metaman a being in itself.