The common & continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot & insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence & corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

The known universe may be arranged in superclusters, or clusters of galaxies, and these in suns or solar systems, and (in our case, the Earth) in geological formations, minerals, crystals, molecules, atoms, nucleons, and whatever ultimate particles may one day be found. That is a quick view of the single inorganic hierarchy of levels of structure from large units to smaller ones. In sharp contrast to this unique hierarchy there is the internal hierarchical structure of every organism, from the organism itself to organs, tissue, cells, micelles, biomolecules, and atoms. This summary statement may not be complete, but it causes one to think. There seems to be one very general type of ordering nearly everywhere in the universe!

Each one of us is a very, very delightfully complex undulation of the energy of the whole universe.

I haven’t proposed anything weirder than the Big Bang, saying that a universe can condense itself faster and faster down into a super-novel object. Sounds to me like a considerably more conservative statement than to say that a universe can spring from nothing for no reason in a single instant.

There is [the possibility], then—isn’t there, at this point in history?—of civilizing technology. Let’s put it that way. You could almost say naturalizing technology.

Geographic sorting means many people barely spend time with anyone on the other political side, so the only information they have on what those people are like comes through distorted media and social media filters. The right-wing narrative floods right-wing people with anecdotes that make it seem like everyone on the left positively despises them and everything they stand for, and vice versa. Outrage about these messages then spreads like wildfire on social media.

Nothing clears fog like a deathbed, which is why it’s then that people can always see with more clarity what they should have done differently—I wish I had spent less time working; I wish I had communicated with my wife more; I wish I had traveled more; etc. The goal of personal growth should be to gain that deathbed clarity while your life is still happening so you can actually do something about it.

When you’ve got the hot water faucet on and cold water is coming out, and you leave it alone, and it keeps coming cold water, cold water, you may, with your fingers on the tap, be impatient and say, “Oh, it’s never going to come!” Sometimes it comes quickly. But this is the idea, you see: that meditation is putting your fingers under the cosmic hot water tap, and then you have to wait for it to happen.

Difference and every kind of variety of differentiation is the way through which unity is discovered.

The consequences of accepting the idea that history is not being pushed by the errors of the past, but is actually being drawn toward an attractor, is that it empowers the human experience. The scientific model of what we’re about is that we’re about zip. I mean, we’re lucky to have gotten an observer’s chair on the cosmic drama in the scientific story of things, and yet it denies our uniqueness.

Jesus ended up saying this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his brother.

We believe, then, that the mind controls the body, not that the body controls itself through the mind. Hence the ingrained prejudice that the mind should be independent of all physical aids to its working—despite microscopes, telescopes, cameras, scales, computers, books, works of art, alphabets, and all those physical tools apart from which it is doubtful whether there would be any mental life at all. At the same time there has always been at least an obscure awareness that in feeling oneself to be a separate mind, soul, or ego there is something wrong. Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature.

Clearly, this conscious cohesion that we claim as peculiar to the human group does not represent a totally new phenomenon in the world. Humanity is not outside life but extends the line of life.

Earth is our birth, our death, enveloping us within its component spheres of biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, technosphere, and noösphere. Planet Earth becomes our god, inspiration, truth, perfection, equality, and source of power.

Nature is self-similar across scales. Companies explode the same way economies explode, the same way the biota of a continent explode. Processes are always similar, but only differ in scale. And what that means, then, is that our most immediate datum of experience—which is the feeling of being in a body, alive and feeling—can be extrapolated and mapped onto larger and smaller processes in the universe.

This is the scandal of biological existence, that I cannot live without killing other creatures.

The psychedelic experience is the replay of human history in the individual mind. If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know who you are.

From the metabolism of a swan to that of Gaia, the main force that dynamic entities must counter is faceless, disruptive entropy, which disperses heat and in general works to dissipate concentrations and complexities that may have been carefully sequestered and built by life.

Forgetting renews. And that also is a function of all demolitions, of deaths, of destruction of patterns, of knocking down buildings, of the whole change process in the universe. Because we want to do what we’ve done before over again. Only, if you remember it too often, it’ll become boring. So if you forget, then you can do it again, and it’ll be just as amazing as it was the first time. And so there absolutely has to be a forgettery built into this universe in just the same way and for just the same reasons that there must be an eliminative process in the body as well as an eating process. And both are vitally important.

In order to answer the question “Where do we go from here?”—which is our theme—we must first honestly recognize where we are now.

I think that this is something of very great importance to the Western world today, because we have developed an immensely powerful technology. We have stronger means of changing the physical universe than has ever existed before. How are we going to use it? There is a Chinese proverb: “If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” Let us assume that our technological knowledge is the right means. What kind of people are going to use this knowledge? Are they going to be people who hate nature and feel alienated from it, or people who love the physical world and feel that the physical world is their own personal body? An extension: the whole physical universe, right out to the galaxies, is simply one’s extended body.

In the future we might well be able to put nucleotides together in any desired sequence to produce whatever human characteristics we think desirable. A disquieting and awesome prospect.

The ideas of individual freedom and fatalism rest on the same assumption—that man is separate, the boss or the puppet. In my view, he cannot act with wisdom unless he feels that what he does and what nature does are one and the same.

Everybody needs to spend a certain amount of time out of every 24 hours—or at least out of every seven days—out of his mind. If you are sane all the time, you’re unreliable. You’re like a bridge that has no give in it, and it doesn’t sway at all in the wind. It’s a rigid bridge, it stands like that—fixed, always. And that’s a very brittle bridge.