Things become complicated only when we think about them, and that’s because we are trying to translate them into a form of life which is very much simpler and cruder than the forms of life we’re talking about. A triangle is very much simpler and cruder than a mountain, even though you may represent a mountain with a triangle.
Sometimes, when I’m in the middle of all of this, I feel as if I were in the middle of an amazing brain.
There is an interdependence of flowers and bees: where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They’re really one organism. And so, in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. So it’s interconnected. And so the many, many patterns of interconnections lock it all together into a unity which is, however, much too complicated for us to think about except in very, very simple, crude ways.
I am, as it were, one of the cells in this tremendous brain, which I can’t understand, because the part cannot comprehend the whole.
I seem, like everything else, to be a center—a sort of vortex—at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself; comes alive. A sort of aperture through which the whole universe is conscious of itself.
Just as the north and south poles of a magnet are united by the magnet, so the individual and the universe are inseparable.
Our failure to feel at home in this astonishing brain in which we live is the result of a basic, initial mistake in our thinking about the world.
In the long run we seem to be destroying the planet by our very efforts to control it and to improve it.
Everything is happening altogether, everywhere at once. And meanwhile, we—with our myopic little minds—are working it out step by step.
We confuse ourselves—as living organisms, which are one with this whole universe—with something we call our personality.
If you try to give up your ego with your ego, then it will take you to the end of time.
All you see is what goes on that is happening of itself. You’re breathing, the wind is blowing, the trees are waving, your blood is circulating, your nerves are tingling. It’s all going on of itself. But, you know, that’s you. That’s the real you! The you that goes on of itself. It’s not the symbol, it’s not the person.
When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there, you’re looking at you.
