When there is a crack in the Cosmic Egg, Buddha is about to be born.

We will not kill the logistical inertia and the paralysis overcoming traffic at its peaks and everywhere in between by killing space through the mirage of velocity, but by killing distance, period.

The centerpiece of the experience of being, and the centerpiece of the psychedelic experience, and the point around which the great issues of modernity revolve is the issue of the felt presence of experience: the relationship of the individual to the sensorium of the body.

When I say that a person is a machine, I think that’s much better than saying there’s a little spark from which all of your virtue comes, because then you don’t deserve it; it’s just a spark.

What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle? What is an ‘I’?

They’re still, according to popular ideas, going ‘round the wheel from life, after life, after life, after life, because they still have the thirst for existence.

If there is in any sense a reason for the world’s existence it must be sought in the present.

Both questions concerned the underlying notion of a dividing line between the world of the living (where distinctions are drawn and difference can be a cause) and the world of nonliving billiard balls and galaxies (where forces and impacts are the “causes” of events).

The perfectly, gloriously happy person wouldn’t remember anything, because every experience would be completely satisfactory. All memory is really a form of regurgitation of undigested experience.

So it is not metaphorically that we have the right to compare—as we have so often done—a city to a symphony or a poem; they are objects of a similar nature. More precious perhaps, the city lies at the confluence of nature and artifice. A congregation of animals that enclose their biological history within its limits and at the same time shape it with all their intentions as passers-by, by its genesis and by its form, the city simultaneously falls under biological procreation, organic evolution and of aesthetic creation. It is at once an object of nature and a subject of culture; individual and group; lived and dreamed: the human thing par excellence.

What is the result of human works if not to create in and through each of us a supremely original center in which the universe uniquely reflects itself? And these centers are our very selves and personalities. Resonance to the All: an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

The one way of not doing anything about a situation is feeling guilty about it. Because when people feel guilty about a situation, most usually—instead of doing something practical to change it—they resort to all sorts of symbolic methods of expiation. They go to confession. They see an analyst. They do all kinds of things which will be ways of actually not doing anything about the problem, but feeling alright about it instead.

In the end it is the meta-adaptation, the adaptation to the total adaptive system, that is going to kill us or let us live.

The culmination of two major evolutionary trends—the trend towards more extreme individuation, and that towards more extensive interrelation and co-operation: persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality in conscious participation.

Does science reduce ethics to mere calculation?

To really understand society, we’ll need to take a closer look at a miniature version of it. You.

We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery. Application of this knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostat controlling room temperature. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all the sensory thresholds of our being.

Space is your mind. It’s very difficult for us to see that because we think we’re in space, and look out at it. There are various kinds of space. There’s visual space: distance. There is audible space: silence. There is temporal space: as we say, between times. There is musical space: so-called distance between intervals, or the intervals between tones, rather; quite a different kind of space than temporal or visual space. There’s tangible space. But all these spaces, you see, are the mind. They’re the dimensions of consciousness.

You are the rest of mankind. If you see that, you won’t give such tremendous importance to yourself.

If a creature can answer a question about a hypothetical experiment, without actually performing that experiment, then he has demonstrated some knowledge about the world. For his answer to the question must be an encoded description of the behavior, inside the creature, of some sub-machine or model responding to an encoded description of the world situation described by the question.

When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing.

It was actually taking place, it wasn’t a dream, a vision nor a symbol to be interpreted. It was there taking place, beyond any doubt; it was not a thing of imagination. No thought could possibly invent it; it was too immense and real for thought to formulate it.

Every new war, embarked upon by the nations for the purpose of detaching themselves from one another, merely results in their being bound and mingled together in a more inextricable knot.

Life, conscience, and spirit are not generated by other than themselves. They are a phenomenon without parents, powerfully and irreversibly urging the winding up of the cosmos into the synthesis of divinity.