The Library
of Consciousness

If you want to be separate—blessings! We’ll wait.

You and I are living in a culture that is paralyzed by fear. Its creative juice is almost totally drained out of it by its fear. This fear is the fear of change, the fear of the unknown.

We grew up (many of us) with the myth that humans were the stewards of nature—or, even worse—nature was there for humans. “Stewards,” at least, was a nice rationalization cop-out. But the game that you’re afraid of is that you are just part of it all. You are part of a biotic community; you are part of many, many social structures. And that’s as much your identity as your being busy being an individual.

The art is not to get so carried away with change you lose the baby with the bath, and not to get so caught in inertia that you miss the opportunity for survival, basically, because you don’t adapt.

The rational mind is in the service of protecting your separateness first. Then you can use it for play and sport and technological advance. But it’s to make you more comfortable and feel safer in a basically unsafe situation. Because your separateness is part of that which is changing.

I’m just shifting consciousness a little bit to say: let’s just stay open to what’s happening and find whether we can be peaceful in the process of change rather than in always resisting the change. Is this too weird?

It’s living with the presence of death, and yet living life fully. It’s always that balance; incredible balance.

We’ve gone from individualism to a beginning sense of the common good, of the recognition we are part of systems.

How much denial, how much closing of your compassionate heart must it take to continue to play the game of “King of the Mountain,” “What’s in it for me?”

If I would like to live in a happy world, maybe what I could contribute is happiness.

The art is to be one and dance as two.

More violence is being done in the name of being compassionate.

It’s just an internal matter. It’s not America giving to the Bosnians, it’s not “me” doing something for “you,” it is a process in which we are a part; in which who’s doing and who isn’t doing is just one dimension of reality, and behind it here I is.