How does the mind absorb suffering? It discovers that resistance and escape—the “I” process—is a false move. The pain is inescapable, and resistance as a defense only makes it worse; the whole system is jarred by the shock. Seeing the impossibility of this course, it must act according to its nature—remain stable and absorb.

Our idea of personality of ourselves includes no information whatsoever about the hypothalamus (an organ of the brain), the pineal gland, really, of the way we breathe, of how our blood circulates, of how we manage to form a sentence, how we manage to be conscious, how you open and close your hand. The information contained in your image of yourself contains nothing about all that. And therefore, obviously, it’s an extremely inadequate image.

What do you suppose the Gospel was; the “good news?” Do you know it never got out? “You, too, are the boss’s son.” That was the gospel.

Humans get together to form group agents of a sort (couples, teams, companies, states). Sometimes these group agents achieve quite a high degree of rational unity, sharing and coordinating on goals, beliefs, and intentions in a deeply integrative and interdependent way. When deep integration and interdependency arises, the group rational agency is not simply reducible to the agency of the individual members.

The objective of Buddhism in all its forms is to bring about a fundamental change in a human being’s everyday state of consciousness. If I make it yet more specific, it’s to bring about a change in your sense of personal identity—that is to say, in your sensation of who and what you are.

There really is a purpose to the universe. Its purpose is this state of hyper-complexification in which all of its points become related to each other.

When there is enough total awareness in the overall system of humanity, humanity itself will lock into a new system of organization, and will become an autonomous, self-steering, brain-like system.

In any event, I have not seen a book on architecture and urban design, recently, that has bothered me as much as this one. If that is an improper foreword, so be it.

Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and perhaps needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half?

While individual thinking suffers from bias, a diversity of biases helps the communal brain reduce blind spots. In a culture where changing your mind is encouraged, new findings spread quickly through the system, and all it takes is one member discovering a falsehood for the whole group to reject it. When disagreement is encouraged, new ideas can be tested as they’re being formed, in real-time, combining the knowledge-building efforts of each person into a single, dynamic process. The result is a multi-mind thinking system that’s superior to any of its individual members at learning new things and separating truth from fiction.

The universe wants to be understood. And the act of understanding it transforms us to the point that we are unrecognizable to each other.

If man is to come up to his full measure, he must become conscious of his infinite capacity for carrying himself still further; he must realize the duties it involves, and he must feel its intoxicating wonder. He must abandon all the illusions of narrow individualism and extend himself, intellectually and emotionally, to the dimensions of the universe: and this even though, his mind reeling at the prospect of his new greatness, he should think that he is already in possession of the divine, is God himself, or is himself the artisan of Godhead.

Every citizen, whether they realize it or not, is a neuron in the mind of a giant organism, and what they do and say in their lifetime contributes to who that organism is, even if only a little bit.

Growth in a complex system may require hundreds of inputs, but at any given time only one input is important—the one that is most limiting. Bread will not rise without yeast, and adding more flour will not help. Corn will not grow without phosphate no matter how much nitrogen is present. This concept is childishly simple and widely ignored.

Modern technology is now drawing humanity into a cohesive entity in which activities are highly interdependent.

The Great Illumination is not a fantastic, extraordinary state of consciousness remote from normal experience.

When you come to the great moments—the actual fact of how great generalized principles are discovered—you come to a priori absolute mystery. Within which a priori absolute mystery, this most sublime and reliable relationship is manifest, is existing. So that, to me, the more intimate you become with the actual working moments of those who made the great discoveries, the more deeply moved you are by an a priori great mystery.

Man and his surroundings have to be conceived as one single whole, a system, in fact, in which changes in one part have an impact on all other parts, directly or indirectly. The picture we should have of our state on this globe is one of interdependence as between nations and regions, and also between man and the natural world which sustains him.

This is not really an escapist philosophy at all. It is most definitely a philosophy of keeping in mind the actual reality of the situation in which you find yourself. I don’t know what could be more realistic than this, what could be more fundamentally facing the hard facts of life. One keeps his attention on the actual concrete fact that is happening, as distinct from our socially conditioned and inculcated ideas and attitudes about it. And this is really facing reality a hundred percent.

The human organism harbors a set of mental and bodily faculties that are intentionally employed for the realization of intentions. These faculties include limbs, controllable muscles, sense organs, those mental faculties that are under conscious control, and any human faculty that can be controlled by the central nervous system. These faculties constitute one’s inalienable set of means that can be employed to realize intentions formed by the will.

We are, each of us, literally connected to the tree stump and to these other things.

What is happening here is not the death of the species or the death of a planetary ecosystem, what is happening here is the birth of a new cosmic order. And if you were to encounter someone giving birth and you had never seen it or even heard it, your impression would be one of emergency. Blood is being shed, there’s moaning and groaning and pain and pleading. It’s a great leap to be able to look at this and say, “Aha, something wonderful is happening here. A new life is about to enter the cosmos. An individual that never existed before is about to take his or her place among us.” This is what we are caught in.

Our intelligence is not disembodied, but is instantiated in physical objects: our brains. Their structure is due to the long process of evolution, and their operations are governed by the laws of physics. Since they are physical entities, our brains run without being told how to run.

Things are terms, not entities. They exist in the abstract world of thought, but not in the concrete world of nature. Thus one who actually perceives or feels this to be so no longer feels that he is an ego, except by definition.