Man, suckled at the wolf’s breasts, sheltered in the brute’s den, brought up in the prowling habit of depredation, suddenly discovers that he is Man, and that his true power lies in yielding up his brute power for the freedom of spirit. The God of humanity has arrived at the gates of the ruined temple of the tribe.

Do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world?

It is very difficult to be powerful. It’s like being in charge of a runaway truck—which, if you stop it suddenly, it will simply disintegrate, and mustn’t be stopped gradually because it’s carrying urgent supplies to a disaster area. And anybody who gets in charge of one of these things isn’t really in charge, he’s simply at the wheel of a completely runaway concern.

These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. It has the sound of epic myth. But it’s simply a description of the evolution of the cosmos as revealed by science in our time. And we—we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos—we’ve begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff contemplating the stars—organized collections of 10 billion-billion-billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth, and perhaps, throughout the cosmos.

It is destructive and deadly in those young and unrealized homosexuals who affect machismo (ultramasculinity) and who constitute the hard core of our military-industrial-police-mafia combine. If they would go and fuck each other (and I use that word in its most positive and appreciative sense), the world would be vastly improved. They make it with women only to brag about it, but are actually far happier in barracks than in boudoirs. This is, perhaps, the real meaning of the slogan “Make love, not war.” We may be destroying ourselves through the repression of homosexuality.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems—vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

What we then see is a flood of sympathetic forces, spreading from the heart of the system, which transforms the whole nature of the phenomenon: sympathy in the first place (an act of quasi-adoration) on the part of all the elements gathered together for the general impulse that carries them along; and also the sympathy (this time fraternal) of each separate element for all that is most unique and incommunicable in each of the co-elements with which it converges in the unity, not only of a single act of vision but of a single living subject.

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.

Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested interested, but a prize continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns himself, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom.

We must have the capacity to think together.

Seen from afar, elementary life looks like a variegated multitude of microscopic elements, a multitude great enough to envelop the earth, yet at the same time sufficiently interrelated and selected to form a structural whole of genetic solidarity.

We are asserting that all, or even most, bullies and ruthless competitors suffer from feelings of inferiority.

Coming with the body is this amazing thing—which everyone wants to give away, throw away, get away from—called the felt moment of immediate experience. The felt moment of immediate experience: this is you, now, here, in your body—with the cheeseburger slowly dissolving, the caffeine, the bladder, all of these things. Collisions. Concrescences. The crossing of trajectories of mental process, digestive process, metabolism, intent, income, emotional state. The felt presence of immediate experience, lodged in the body-mind system, in the moment: that’s who you are.

If you take this task of what we call the conquest of nature—the task of making order victorious over chaos or randomness—if you take this seriously, you will look upon it as warfare and you will firmly believe that the most urgent thing that there possibly can be is to make order prevail over randomness, to make good prevail over evil, to make life prevail over death.

What you see outside you and feel outside you is the way you feel inside your skin.

I really do agree with your contention that the drug [LSD] attacks defense mechanisms built up carefully to conceal the truth of our direct sensory perceptions. One would a priori imagine, however, that a drug which forced us to see the world as it is would be welcomed. Why, then, is the entire “consciousness-expanding” drug movement confronted with enormous hostility?

A nonlogical, nonstatistical, nonrandom, nonerratic process has taken hold: the living phenomenology.

See, that’s the bad side of the wonderful philosophy that we have a wonderful spark: that there’s a central being in your mind without much structure, and it’s either good or bad, you see.

We have not realized, therefore, that our environment is not something other than ourselves. In assuming that it is, we have made a great mistake and are now paying the price for it.

For those of you that have gotten caught in individualism and separateness, the act of serving another human being is a doorway back into your connection to the universe.

The gull isn’t rapacious or greedy. It’s just that his being alive at all is the same thing as eating crabs. Sea birds are transformations of fish. Men are transformations of wheat, chickens, and steers. And a love for the food is the agony of the food. To object to this inseparability of pleasure and pain, life and death, is simply to object to existence. But, of course, we cannot help objecting when the time comes.

Why has there been, in the world, thousands and thousands of years this constant division? The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians—you know, the whole division. Why? Is it because no two human beings have ever found out how to think together? You understand my point? You and I can’t think together. I want to. The speaker says, “For God’s sake, let’s think together! Because we will create a different world altogether.” But you say, “Sorry. I want my opinions, I like my opinions, I cannot let go [of] my experiences, my pleasures.” So it keeps that division going.

What more do we need to convince ourselves of the vital error hidden in the depths of any doctrine of isolation? The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.

If anything qualifies as a superorganism it is an ant hill or a bee hive. The border of each, with a few big orifices issuing forth from ground or tree, seems animal-like: barriers and pores spatially crisp and functionally formal. But when masses of workers disperse to forage, the edge of the superorganism is spatially even fuzzier than a cloud’s edge.