If cells aggregate to form a multicellular organism, then organisms might aggregate to form an organism of organisms: a superorganism.

Every one of us is, actually, a pinhole through which the fundamental light—that is, existence itself—looks out. Only, the game we’re playing is not to know this. To be only that little hole, which we call “me,” “my ego,” my specific “John Jones,” or whatever.

So the secret of waking up from the drama, the endless cycles, is the realization that the only time that there is is the present.

When you were born you were kicked off a precipice, and there’s nothing that can stop you falling. And although there are a lot of rocks falling with you (with trees growing on them and all sorts of things like that), you can cling to one of those rocks if you like as it goes down with you for safety, but it’s not safe. Nothing is safe. Everything is falling apart. Everything is in a state of change and there’s no way of stopping it. And when you are really resigned to that, and when you really accept that, then there’s nothing left to be afraid of. And when there’s nothing left to be afraid of, and you’ve given everything up, and you know that even—you know, a lot of people in religion cling to suffering, because they know they are right as long as they hurt. “Oh, I bless the good Lord for my boils, for my mental and bodily pains. For without them my faith all congeals, and I’m doomed to hell’s ne’er-ending flames.” You know? A lot of people who know that they are right so long as they suffer. But that’s an illusion, too. Even suffering offers no security. Even suicide offers no security in Buddhism, you see? There is no security at all. You simply have to face this fact that everything is in flux, and go. Go, go, go with it.

You do not have to be any particular kind of religion to get this experience. It can hit anyone any time, like falling in love. There are obviously a number of you in this building who’ve had it in greater or lesser degree. But it’s found all over the world. And when it hits you, you know it. Sometimes it comes after long practice of meditations and spiritual discipline, sometimes it comes for no reason that anybody can determine. We say it’s the grace of god: that there comes this overwhelming conviction that you have mistaken your identity. That, what you thought (what I thought) was just old Alan Watts (who I know very well) is just a big act and the show. But what I thought was me was only completely superficial. That I am an expression of an eternal something-or-other, X—a name that can’t be named, as the name of God was taboo among the Hebrews. I am. And that I suddenly understand exactly why everything is the way it is. It’s perfectly clear. Furthermore, I feel no longer any boundary between what I do and what happens to me. I feel that everything that’s going on is my doing, just as my breathing is. Is your breathing voluntary or involuntary? Do you do it or does it happen to you? See, you can feel it both ways. But you feel everything like breathing. And it isn’t as if you had become a puppet. There is no longer any separate “you.” There is just this great happening going on.

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before and no other human being will ever see again. But, in fact, this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.

The Internet is a technological artifact; the literal exteriorization of the human nervous system brought into being by forces of big science and big capitalism and big military strategic thinking, and now in the service of a global information marketplace.

Man is the only creature to use exosomatic tools, such as machines and vehicles, in a massive way. Their operation requires much more energy than the living parts of the system. Sociocultural systems only partly obey the laws of biological life. If self-organizing systems from chemical dissipative structures to ecosystems are self-limiting, technology represents a world of equilibrium structures whose growth is not self-limiting. Their energetic aspect refers to mixed equilibrium/non-equilibrium systems—or man/technology systems.

It’s a machine; so are we.

The thesis that I am developing conceives ‘proof’, in the strict sense of that term, as a feeble second-rate procedure. When the word ‘proof’ has been uttered, the next notion to enter the mind is ‘half-heartedness’. Unless proof has produced self-evidence and thereby rendered itself unnecessary, it has issued in a second-rate state of mind, producing action devoid of understanding. Self-evidence is the basic fact on which all greatness supports itself.

I approach this whole matter because of my interest in the Chinese and Japanese philosophy of nature, wherein there is not this sense of hostility between the human organism and its environment, but rather a sense of being one with it and collaborating with it. And thus it’s been my particular interest to see in what way this Far Eastern attitude to nature—based originally on the philosophy of Taoism—is applicable in a technological civilization.

What do rocks represent? What do trees represent? What do mountains represent? Do they symbolize something? Do they have some purpose in that they are intentionally working to produce a future result? Do the waves washing on the shore and making strange patterns of foam on the sand have some intention? Are they symbolizing anything? No. But then, why does the artist so often copy the forms of nature? Surely he does it because he is paying a tribute to a certain kind of meaninglessness, a certain kind of joyous purposelessness in nature. And this fact of our being constantly fascinated by the freedom of natural forms from having to mean something, from having to make sense—that is a kind of relief to us.

The freedom that’s discovered isn’t, “I have attained enlightenment.” The freedom is, “My God, there is nobody here to be enlightened. Therefore, there is nobody there to be unenlightened.” That’s the light. Only the concept “me” thinks it needs enlightenment, freedom, liberation, and emancipation. It thinks it needs to find God or get a Ferrari—it’s all the same thing when you get right down to it.

What you call the “external world” is as much you as your own body. Your skin doesn’t separate you from the world, it’s a bridge through which the external world flows into you and you flow into it.

The story that we have learned to believe is that we are encapsulated inside the bodymind looking out through the windows of our senses at an objective world that exists independently of awareness, “out there” somewhere, a world that is full of separate “things,” including millions of other people, each of them with free will, each freely choosing what to do and what not to do. But does any such objective, external, material world really exist? Are we actually encapsulated inside an object gazing out at a bunch of other objects?

The word māyā is not necessarily used in a bad sense, as if it were a mere dream. I have said that māyā also means art and miraculous power, the creation of an illusion so fabulous that it takes in its Creator. God himself is literally a-mazed at and in his own work.

The only possibly harmonious religion for mankind could be one which has in it no ideology. It would have no doctrines, so there would be nothing to argue about.

From the time of the awareness of existence of the soul until the resolution of the apocalyptic potential, there are roughly 50,000 years. In biological time, this is only a moment, yet it is five times the entire span of history. In that period, everything hangs in the balance, because it is a ma rush from monkeydom to starshiphood. In the leap across those 50,000 years, energies are released, religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies evolve and die, science arises, magic arises, all of these concerns that control power with greater and lesser degrees of ethical constancy appear. There is the possibility of aborting the species’ transformation into a hyperspatial entelechy.

The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.

With the capability of self-reflexion we have become the mind of a universe becoming increasingly aware of itself.

A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.

The point is always: so long as I can beguile you (as teacher) into thinking there’s something you can get, you need to study with me. When I can no longer fool you into thinking that there’s something to get out of life, you will know that you’re life. You don’t get something out of it, you’re it! But so long as you can be fazed and you could be taken in by the teacher, you need a teacher.

Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.

You can’t make a person who knows that he is a separate ego unselfish. All you can do is to turn him into a hypocrite and make him pretend to unselfish actions. A person can only be unselfish when he has thoroughly transcended the egotistic point of view, and then proceeds to do what he feels like. Because then he can act in consonance with the sensation of social and cosmic unity.