The quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch – which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity.

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

The march of the human mind is slow.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

Meditation is a vital practice to access conscious contact with your highest self.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Whatever you dwell on in the conscious grows in your experience.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

Creationists make it sound as though a ‚theory‘ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

I was brought up to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.

The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

I miss the early days; I do. I was so lucky. I basically had it to myself, learning about these chimpanzees. Nobody knew anything about them. Discovering their different personalities, different life histories. I was lucky.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we’re now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.

I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately… you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn’t anticipate.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

My purpose is to help people look at themselves and begin to shift their concepts. Remember, we are not our country, our race, or religion. We are eternal spirits. Seeing ourselves as spiritual beings without label is a way to transform the world and reach a sacred place for all of humanity.

Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.

Everybody should have a fair deal; everybody should have the chance to life in this world. If we were evolved as human beings, we would hopefully be able to alleviate suffering in the world.

I’m interested in the dream and subconscious mind, the peculiar dream-like quality of our lives, sometime nightmare quality of our lives.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – the only one in the whole Milky Way – with a century of transportation whoopee.

Everything has changed, and nothing has changed more than the world of fashion.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.