The public is a concept that was created in the Renaissance. It was created by print. There never before was that notion. It’s something necessary for democracies to do business: there has to be a public. But when we identify with the public, we essentially become creatures of the herd. Eccentricity is mitigated against. That’s why this very small flute theme called bohemianism just will not die in Western civilization. You know, it’s always been there. It was there before rave, before punk, before rock’n’roll, before jazz, before the impressionists, before the romantics, back, back, back. There was always this strain of dissent, because it’s the lifeline of sanity in Western society. And every time the bastions of bullshittery grow weak, the bohemian thread expands its options; offers itself as an alternative.

One of the key challenges of our time is creating a sustainable future for our children and future generations, and the unit of sustainability is the community. We know that in ecosystems: ecosystems are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms—ecological communities. And also, in the human realm, what is sustainable is not an individual (or an individual organization or business or whatever), but is a community. And so the way nature sustains life is to build and nurture communities. That’s a very profound lesson we need to learn.

If evolution is to continue in a hominized medium, it is physically necessary that man believe, as vigorously as possible, in some absolute value possessed by the movement which it is his duty to forward.

How many of us now realize that space is the same thing as mind, or consciousness? That when you look out into infinity you are looking at yourself? That your inside goes with your entire outside as your front with your back? That this galaxy, and all other galaxies, are just as much you as your heart or your brain? That your coming and going, your waking and sleeping, your birth and your death, are exactly the same kind of rhythmic phenomena as the stars and their surrounding darkness? To be afraid of life is to be afraid of yourself.

The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. But to the whole mind there is no contrast of “I” and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.

If we don’t talk about it, it isn’t a meme; it’s a private obsession, it’s something underground. But we bring it into competition in the environment of natural selection for applicable meaning when we utter it. And that’s why the beginning of any social change is discussion.

The planet is one living thing.

Until man, it is true enough that living branches develop primarily by stifling and eliminating one another—the law, in fact, of the jungle. By contrast, starting with man and within the human group, this is no longer true: the play of mutual destruction ceases to operate. Selection, no doubt, is still at work and can still be recognize, but it no longer holds the most important place; and the reason for this is that the appearance of thought has added a new dimension to the universe.

The network of social, communication, and economic links make individuals, organizations, machines, and even ecosystems across the world ever more dependent on each other, and ever less capable of acting purely on their own without considering potentially faraway consequences.

Every baby that is born is a mutant. Every baby is the genetic code’s newest and most creative answer to the problem of adapting to the other forms of life and energy on this planet.

Wealth consists of physical energy (as matter or radiation) combined with metaphysical know-what and know-how.

Stasis in living systems is death.

The crisis we are in is the complete blowing up, the complete debunking (or self-contradiction is the best word to use) of the notion that success comes through force. Look at the war in Vietnam: shooting mosquitoes with machine guns, and we think, you know, we’re gonna just kick the shit out of ’em. You know? That sort of attitude; that sort of nasty, over-specialized male attitude, which is exemplified in so much of our population. Come off it! You’re not going to move anything that way. Real power is not force. Real power is falling, is using your weight. “All comes to him who waits.”.

The male-dominant agenda is so fragile that any competitor is felt as a deadly foe.

With a new perspective made possible by such products of technology as rapid global communication and photographs from space, humanity has begun to glimpse Metaman.

Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.

If the power of attraction between simple atoms is so great, what may we not expect if similar bonds are contracted between human molecules? Humanity, as I have said, is building its composite brain beneath our eyes.

This is what being psychedelic means: it means you’re more than a surface. You have more to say than “Have a nice day.” You’re there, you know? And a lot of people aren’t. They’re just fulfilling sociological algorithms that are imposed from the top.

The source of this global force is exactly the same as the source of what happens in the individual—that is, the collective programs. That, if they aren’t changed, nothing can be done. You see, people have tried by every means imaginable—by religion, by science, by politics—to change this, and nothing has happened, right? It has gone on much the same over thousands of years. Now, somehow that is not going to change fundamentally unless you get at the root of it. Society is basically identical with the individual at this deep root. The society is nothing but the totality of individuals who are caught in it; who are, in turn, reinforcing each other.

We’re talking about the fate of a whole planet. Why are people so polite? Why are they so patient? Why are they so forgiving of gangsterism and betrayal? It’s very difficult to understand.

Mind is a phenomenon of metabolic activity. So far as we know, where there is not metabolism, there is not consciousness. Even computers—they have to have a flow of electrons in their guts. When there’s no electrons flowing, there’s no computation taking place. Similarly for us: when there is no flow of electrons, no charge transfer, then you’re dead. You know? And there’s no coming back from that. But if you have had children, look what’s happened: half of your information has been kept alive in the non-equilibrium thermodynamic state of the dissipative structure which is the species, you see?

To live I must have faith. I must trust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust myself to a nature which doesn’t have a boss. Because a boss is a system of mistrust.

Let the theorists consider themselves. How are they capable of reasoning at all if not because within them their visceral system has been taught to function automatically, while around them society is so well organized that they have both the strength and the leisure to calculate and reflect? What is true for each individual man is precisely what is happening at this moment on the higher level of mankind. Like a heavenly body that heats as it contracts, such, and in a twofold respect, is the Noösphere: first in intensity, the degree in which its tension and psychic temperature are heightened by the coming together and mutual stimulation of thinking centers throughout its extent; and also quantitatively through the growing number of people able to use their brains because they are freed from the need to labor with their hands.

My god is dust, an immense whirl of dust among infinite whirls of dust.