The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected - and by physical relations of fascinating complexity.
The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than understand and explain it.
If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.
Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.
I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.
The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.
Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.
We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
Everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality.
There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.
As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords
A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.
We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy.
To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.
A less 'brainy-culture' would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.
Everybody is I, you all know you are you. And wheresoever's beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't any difference. You are all of them, and when they come into being that's you coming into being, you know that very well. Only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland. You don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it, like you breathe. Doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing, and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education on how to do it.
If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.
If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed
Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
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