Reality is itself a combination of determinisms, and freedom consists in overcoming and transcending these determinisms.

All sights and all sounds are what the nerves inside your head are doing.

Over immense periods of time, living processes began to rival non-living physical processes in shaping the planet and atmosphere, giving earth the unique appearance of a multicolored jewel when viewed from space.

We’re really good at identifying things as other. We’re not really good at understanding when we’re the same or when we’re part of an integrated system that’s actually functioning together in some kind of cohesive way.

Life has to surprise itself, because if it doesn’t, you don’t know you’re there!

From the cell to man, as from the atom to the cell, a single process—a constant increase of the ‘within’—continues without interruption, and always in the same direction: forward.

Human energy presents itself to our view as the term of a vast process in which the whole mass of the universe is involved. In us the evolution of the world towards the spirit becomes conscious. From that moment, our perfection, our interest, our salvation as elements of creation can only be to press on with this evolution with all our strength.

Hundreds of millions of people in the world lead larval, low-awareness lives—I’m not talking about the poor unwashed, I’m talking about people who watch TV six and seven hours a day: that’s a drug. And those people have chosen to check out of the historical adventure and just live in this miasma of pop culture. And we can decry the loss to them (of awareness and so forth and so on), but on the other hand, it makes it easier for the rest of us, I think.

Does intelligence spell solutions or problems? Intelligence means solutions, isn’t it? Unfortunately, today it’s human intelligence which is causing all the problems, simply because we are too stuck with our individuality. We don’t understand this is just a privilege. Tomorrow morning, if they bury us in the land, we will become one with everything, alright?

A system that takes its goals from its own performance is very likely to drift downhill.

The planet Earth as we have it is a result of a vast range of experimentation over billions of years. Over billions of years. And things have been fitted together so intimately that, once we enter into it and start tearing apart things that have been adjusted through a long period of development, then we have to be enormously sensitive how we deal with these things.

Science and psychotherapy have also done much already to liberate us from the prison of isolation from nature in which we were supposed to renounce Eros, despise the physical organism, and rest all our hopes in a supernatural world […]. This liberation is, in other words, a very partial affair even for the small minority which has fully understood and accepted it. It leaves us still as strangers in the cosmos—without the judgment of God but without his love, without the terrors of Hell but without the hope of Heaven, without many of the physical agonies of pre-scientific times but without the sense that human life has any meaning.

If you listen to Mozart and say, “By Jove, what a lovely… I had a lovely evening the other day listening to that music and I want to play it again,” you have lost something. And if you listen so completely, then the thing itself is like a seed dropped into the earth: it flourishes, you don’t have to do a thing about it. In the same way, if you observe closely—that is, in which there is only observation (only observation!), not the observer saying “I will observe”—then, in that observation and listening, there is a strange quality of attention which is insight.

What would your state of mind be if you knew everything? If you were in control of everything, including your own will? Let’s suppose your entire being-structure is voluntary and it’s up to you now. What are you going to do?

We are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket. Because that is the attitude of attacking the unknown. And that causes us not to realize that we are already on the most magnificently equipped spaceship which could hardly be improved upon. It has got a source of temperature and energy just at the right distance from it. It’s beautifully equipped with oxygen, with food supplies, with all kinds of delightful things to do while on the journey. And it’s traveling through space at a colossal speed. And it’s called the planet Earth. The art of exploring from the planet Earth depends not on conquering space with rockets and bombs, but on developing greater sensitivity in the place where we are.

If language let humans send a thought from one brain to another, writing let them stick a thought onto a physical object, like a stone, where it could live forever.

The problem with human beings is that we ride very close to a kind of bifurcation point in terms of whether our loyalty is transferred to the group or to the individual. And this can be sent either way. I mean, if there were to be landslides at both ends of highway 1 and a food shortage, we would coalesce marvelously into a survival machine where we would all place group values higher than our own needs—and nobly so. This would happen. But in situations of abundance and non-scarcity, it’s like a slime mold without the formality of coherency. We just then dissolve into this sort of every-man-for-himself egocentric style.

As a carryover from ancestral tribal life, we are highly tuned to social signals: comparing ourselves to others, seeking approval, acceptance, and jockeying for status. With material and now digital wealth as today’s primary status signal, consumerism is now largely based on having as much or more than those around us rather than focusing on what we may actually need.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

From the moment when man recognizes that he is in a state of evolution, he can no longer progress unless he develops in himself a deep-rooted, passionate zest for his own evolution: and there is the further reason that it is precisely this dynamic zest that could be vitiated beyond repair and annihilated by the prospect, however far ahead it may lie, of a definitive and total death.

People will live in symbiosis with this surrounding network of technological systems, and out of this symbiosis a higher level intelligence will emerge.

We are one species. We are star stuff, harvesting starlight.

To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.

Man not only knows; he knows that he knows. He reflects. But this power of reflection, when restricted to the individual, is only partial and rudimentary.