I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.

Regard the world as a movement of universal convergence, within which the plurality of matter is consummated in spirit.

We are not making the waves in this ocean, we are corks riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged by perhaps chance alone to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe; a moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming evolutionary inflationary expansion.

The physical Universe consists entirely of the most exquisitely interreciprocating technology. Ninety-nine percent of humanity thinks technology is a “new” phenomenon.

We have begun, first of all, you see, with the understanding that religion is not an acquisition, and therefore there’s nothing you can do to acquire it. You begin from the point of recognition that you are what you are. You can’t improve yourself—because if you try to, you’ll only make yourself more tied up and then messed up. See? You have to recognize that, because there’s no alternative. And then you’re in a position to be very simply and ingenuously aware of life without trying to do anything to it. You let it happen. And then it begins to show its color. And then you feel intensely the marvel and magical nature of the world, so that whatever you do by way of a religious practice is an art form (like singing) to express the marvelous feeling that comes out of this. Not to secure yourself, not to acquire anything, any reward, but simply to live it up.

What exists—reality itself—is gorgeous. It is the plenum, the fullness of total joy. Wowee! And all those stars—if you look out in the sky—is a firework display like you see on the fourth of July, which is a great occasion for celebration. The universe is a celebration. It is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is. Wowee!

All language is a hint, with luck evoking in the individual receiving the spoken or written word a corresponding state of awareness.

When history becomes a science, life will be art.

Our intellectual and scientific “establishment” is, in general, still spellbound by the myth that human intelligence and feeling are a fluke of chance in an entirely mechanical and stupid universe—as if figs would grow on thistles or grapes on thorns. But wouldn’t it be more reasonable to see the entire scheme of things as continuous with our own consciousness and the marvelous neural organization which, shall we say, sponsors it?

This is the spirit which our present day world needs more than anything else: to see that what is truly important in life is what is frivolous. To see that it doesn’t matter two hoots that we achieve a certain success, that we win a certain game, that we live longer than we might live otherwise. What matters more than anything else is that “the king be cutting capers and the priest be picking flowers.”.

The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.

If we are all part of one boundless body, what’s that like? In the realm of the boundless body, there’s nothing to give and nothing to receive. Compassion: I see someone’s hand stuck to a hot stove, I think, “Oh, the poor person!” And I go pull their hand off. But I had to think about it and make a judgment and a decision. My hand gets stuck to the stove, there’s no moment of thought because I’m one being. If you have this kind of wisdom as a deep experience, then compassion is just what arises; because everything is just you.

Outer space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. It’s a vast unfilled void into which anything whatsoever can be projected. The hallucinations of the individual are the cultural artifacts of the species 500 years from now. I mean, all these visions and dreams that we have will be realized—in ways that we cannot imagine, but realized nevertheless. This has been consistently what has been going on. The alchemical dreams of the sixteenth century are fully realized in the twentieth century, you know? And of course it has facets that they never imagined.

Courageous, conscious, reflective, human life is impossible (by which I mean that it contains an intrinsic contradiction) unless Spirit—our Spirit—can have a guarantee of its success, and a promise of its future.

Sometimes I cannot help imagining a powerful Mother Evolution stirring the soup in the pot of life with no other purpose in mind than to keep things moving and thereby stimulate innovation.

The apparent restriction of the phenomenon of consciousness to the higher forms of life has long served science as an excuse from eliminating it from its models of the universe. A queer exception, an aberrant function, an epiphenomenon—thought was classed under one or other of these heads in order to get rid of it.

What’s the fundamental unit that exists in the world? Is it genes? Is it information? What is it that’s really spreading through the universe and then differentially reproducing?

Emergence in general is basically just the measure of surprise for the observer.

I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience, and the drug is technology. And as technology gets more and more perfected as a mirror of the human mind, the cultural experience becomes more and more hallucinatory.

Nature works by steps. The atoms form molecules. The molecules form bases. The bases form amino acids. They form proteins. The proteins work in cells. The cells make, first of all, the simple animals and then sophisticated ones, climbing step by step. Evolution is the climbing of a ladder from simple to complex by steps, each of which is stable in itself.

Evolution may be compared, broadly speaking, to a river made up of amorphous streams (Entropy) within which countless eddies are individualized by a counter-current. “Phenomenally” speaking, we see the World not merely as a system that is simply in movement, but as one that is in a state of genesis—a very different matter. Across the metamorphoses of Matter something is being made (and at the same time being unmade) in accordance with a particular global orientation—and this irreversibly and cumulatively.

And how many steps backward in the process of trying to define and honor the human spirit have occurred because of drugs like sugar, opium, tea, coffee? Look at the caffeine drugs: they’re the only drugs on Earth that modern industrialists recognize to the point that they write them into contracts with workers—the coffee break. This isn’t because they love workers, it’s because it makes workers work!

When it is said that those who search for happiness never find it, perhaps the truth is that there is no need to search for it.

Mental activity or consciousness will not be found in the brain, but in a system of relations including both the organism and environment, and the traditional psychological “functions” (such as sensation, perception, memory, et cetera) describe only different aspects of the organization of the whole organism-environment system.