Follow your bliss. I mean, find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.
We are dealing in a totality of humanity, not the (up to my generation) completely divided humanity spread very far apart on our planet.
Organisms don’t have bosses. They are essentially, I would say, democratic arrangements where—somehow, in a marvelous way—an enormous company of cells are working together.
If, therefore, you get this sense—just like you’ve got the sense of nothing behind your eyes—get the sense of nothingness (very powerful, frisky nothingness) underlying your whole being, and there’s nothing in that nothing to be afraid of, then—with that sense—you can come on like a person for whom the rest of life is gravy because you’re already dead. You know you’re going to die. We say there’s one thing certain, which is death and taxes. And the death of each one of us, now, is as certain as it would be if we were going to die five minutes from now. So where’s your anxiety, where’s your hangup? Regard yourself as dead already so that you have nothing to lose.
The jet travelers, in a sense, are shamanic flight cast in a technological and commercial mode. Most of the dreams of modern civilization—limitless mobility, flying through the air, seeing what’s going on somewhere else—these are all the technological realizations of shamanic visions. These things have been envisaged for thousands of years by shamans. Now we can all have them at just the press of a credit card.
He finds out that you, your behavior, is not something that can be separated from the behavior of the world around you. He realizes, then, that “you” are something that the whole world is doing.
You realize that what you love when you love yourself is always some other object than yourself. You like eating ice cream. You like beautiful views. You like your house. You like your friends. You like kissing beautiful girls. You like this. But it’s all not me! See? You suddenly realize you can’t separate your self that you love from everything else that your self implies. Then, you know, you begin to wonder which end is up. But it soon clarifies, and you suddenly see the whole thing—and this can become with psychedelics a very, very vivid thing—the whole universe as a colossal energy play going this way and that way, totally indestructible, and it’s all you, and you didn’t know it. It doesn’t mean you’re the only one. This thing proliferates in millions and millions of centers, but it’s all one center. And you can get the physical sensation of the thing being an enormous, as it were, sort of center of light: of joyous, whooping, glorious, loving BOOM, like that. And this will only usually last for a few moments, where you feel you’ve actually put your finger on the center of reality. And it’s this tremendous luminous energy. Just beautiful!
Humanity is an important participant in a saga extending from the universe’s distant past toward its far future. The story begins with the giant explosion that created everything around us, tells of the formation of galaxies, the births and deaths of fiery stars, and the condensation of our own Earth from the swirling gases that also bore our sun. It traces the long evolution of life from the primeval ooze: its triumphant moves into new environments, its massive die-offs, its prolific creations. Approaching our era, the saga tells of the arrival of humanity and how this led to the birth of Metaman; looking into the future it prophesies Metaman’s journey out from its cradle into the larger universe awaiting it. There is no greater epic. Its scale is vast, its outline compelling, its details riveting. It is more than a story, it is the story, and we are privileged to know as much of it as we do. No generations before us have been so fortunate.
Evolution, starting from present-oriented physical and chemical structures, gradually integrates the past in biological development and the future in neural development into the life processes of the individual systems. It is interesting that neural (sociocultural) evolution re-enacts the integration of the past into the present at a new level—and not in the same sequence as biochemical and biological evolution.
By achieving this clarity regarding the morphic at all levels, human reason turns a corner, and man sees what he has never seen before. He sees—when he is not pathological—that there is no agency or power in him, no desire, thought, or action, no healthy process of any kind, which is not the expression, direct or indirect, of the tendency toward organic coordination active within himself. His supreme blessing comes not from God, but from the fact that he is an organism seeking coordination. For example, all the operations of his brain express the self-regulatory tendencies of the animal organisms in their most general form. To put the same fact in other terms: no religion, no philosophy, no science, no medicine, could assist man by one jot were his underlying organic tendency not present and active within him. In the most austere, authentic, and objective sense, recognition of the status and power of the morphic processes at all levels in himself carries human awareness beneath the perceptions of the traditional religions and of the special sciences to an aesthetic level hitherto experienced and expressed only by poets, for several poets have said what I am trying to say here. To experience this vision is joy.
The way in which you see the point [is] by taking the line of least resistance. By facing the facts. By not super-adding to truth something you contribute to it.
There is no “you” separate from you. In other words, when you try to control your thoughts or control your feelings, there is no difference between the thoughts and the controller. Because what you call the thinker is simply your thought of yourself. The thinker is a thought among thoughts, and the feeler is a feeling among feelings. And trying to control thoughts with thoughts is like trying to bite your own teeth.
If you see yourselves in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as, say, trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the shape of fire, the arrangement of the stars, the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that. There’s nothing wrong with you at all.
If you find this frustrating, if you really don’t like it, you don’t have to do it! You can stop. And the paradox is that, when you stop, you become happier and more energetic.
I’ve sometimes suggested that all we are is an elaborate system of tubes, and the object of these tubes is to put things in at one end and let them out at the other, and enjoy that. Enjoy it so much that you like other tubes, and you make connections with those tubes in such a way that you get more tubes. Now, these tubes have ganglia at each end, the top end, called a brain. And the point of that ganglion is to be a very sensitive, cunning little thing that finds out where there are things to eat. So they keep reproducing each other. And so the whole of life becomes the flow of a stuff through a tube. Get that through, and get it going faster, get more of it going through. Get more of it. And don’t let it foul things up as it goes through. Everything, as it goes through a tube, tends to wear the tube out. So the tube tries not to be worn out by the stuff going through it so as to keep the sensation going on.
Metabolically, most individuals are already strongly integrated into the superorganism: they are wholly dependent on society for shelter, energy, food, water, health, and waste disposal. Even the birth of a new human being nowadays is difficult to imagine without a complicated socio-technical infrastructure of hospitals, doctors, nurses, and machinery. Intellectually, too, individuals get most of their information, knowledge, and values from the surrounding social system.
I used the word “novelty” out of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, because he had this notion that novelty was the concrescing of a force which knits things together. And I like that; that’s what I felt it was: that the Tao is making itself, and that this compression of novelty through the speeding-up of time will eventually reach a place where everything is connected to everything else. And this is, you know, the universe’s self-birthing of itself.
The significance in terms of “phase” or “stage” has not been sufficiently recognized or made use of: I mean that of association or, better still, social organization. No sooner is it constituted by the grouping together of elementary particles, than the living element, whatever its degree of internal complexity, begins to reproduce itself. But the process does not end there. When it exists in sufficient numbers the separate element tends to link up with others of its kind so as to form with them a more or less differentiated organic whole.
Thought is matter and it can be made into anything, ugly—beautiful.
Noögenesis rises upwards in us and through us unceasingly. We have pointed to the principal characteristics of that movement: the closer association of the grains of thought; the synthesis of individuals and of nations or races; the need of an autonomous and supreme personal focus to bind elementary personalities together, without deforming them, in an atmosphere of active sympathy. And, once again: all this results from the combined action of two curvatures—the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of mind—in conformity with the law of complexity and consciousness.
It would be a representation in which you become aware that you’re part of some kind of global information-processing system; like thought in the global mind—and a conscious thought at that, coexisting with many other self-reflexive thoughts.
Language is so magical because it allows individual brains to connect, like neurons, to form a larger thinking system. If a human’s Inner Self is like a neuron, the Outer Self’s ability to express itself gives the neuron its axons, and its ability to see or listen to the expression of others gives it dendrites. These channels let individual human brains combine together to form a larger communal brain. Humans can form brains of all different sizes, depending on the number of people communicating with each other. There’s no limit on how large a brain humans can meld into. In human societies, vast interconnected gossip networks, with the help of tools of mass broadcast, allow thousands of communal brains to quickly connect, turning huge portions of a society into giant thinking systems.
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.
As the world is a continuum, one sees immediately that ordinary language does deceive us all the time. It is one of the reasons why we have this mania—so frequently stressed in all the oriental texts—of thinking of ourselves and of every object in the world as being separate and self-subsistent when, in fact, of course, they’re all part of a universal One.
