“‘You're assuming,' said Dr. Robert, 'that the brain produces consciousness. I'm assuming that it transmits consciousness.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“[Meditation cultivates] the state of mind that makes it possible for the dazzling ecstatic insights to become permanent and habitual illuminations… and by getting to know oneself to the point where one won’t be compelled by one’s unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd, self-stultifying things that one so often finds oneself doing.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“[Recipe for a rising-sun world]: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“[Recipe for a setting-sun world]: Take one sexually inept wage-slave, one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television-addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“[We are] victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are over consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”

Chapters: 58. Goals Without Means

Comments: Click to comment

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words---people take them too seriously, and what happens?…sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders.”

Chapters: 71. Sick of Sickness

Comments: Click to comment

“Dualism... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.”

Chapters: 39. Oneness

Comments: Click to comment

“Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”

Chapters: 71. Sick of Sickness

Comments: Click to comment

“Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry!”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.”

Chapters: 56. One with the Dust

Comments: Click to comment

“In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king… He gets lynched.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.”

Chapters: 80. A Golden Age

Comments: Click to comment

“Start by being fully aware of what you think you are. It’ll help you to become aware of what you are in fact.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“What’s in a name? — practically everything… We give the stuff good names—moksha-medicine, reality revealer, a truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“While you people are over-consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“You forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“You prefer to use Pavlov for brainwashing, Pavlov for selling cigarettes and vodka and patriotism. Pavlov for the benefit of dictators, generals and tycoons… but Pavlov could be used for good purposes, for friendliness and trust and compassion.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment