“You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.”

“For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you willnever be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be livingfor some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit backwith full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entireeducation has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparingyou for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.”

“So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that thebeating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're doing,then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not onlybeating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of yourbodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with theshining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all thewaves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that's continuous with the AtlanticOcean, and that's all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to beingthe Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are acontinuous energy system. It isn't just that the East River is part of it. You can't draw anyline and say 'Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,' as if you canin the parts of an automobile, where you can say 'This is definitely part of the generator,here, and over here is a spark plug.' There's not that kind of isolation between the elementsof nature.”

“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.”

“You have seen that the universe is at root amagical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate"you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. Theonly real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdrawsitself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is theuniverse looking at itself from billions of points of view, points thatcome and go so that the vision is forever new.”

“The morality thatgoes with this understanding is, above all, the frank recognition of yourdependence upon enemies, underlings, out-groups, and, indeed, upon allother forms of life whatsoever. Involved as you may be in the conflictsand competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able toindulge in the illusion that the "offensive other" is all in the wrong, andcould or should be wiped out.”

“Now as you plumb out into the universe and explore it astronomically, it gets very strange. You begin to see things in the depths that at first sight seem utterly remote. How could they have anything to do with us. They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way, when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image. Look at a spermatozoon under a microscope. That little tadpole! And how can that have any connection with a grown human being. It’s so unlike, you see. It’s foreign feeling. And you get the creeps, a foreign feeling, about yourself...But what we will always find out in the end when we meet the very strange thing, there will one day be the dawning recognition: Why that’s me.”