'Not only are we traveling through the universe, but the universe is traveling through us. It needs to feel us, what we are feeling, our marvels and infatuations and heartaches;... to know what that stuff is, how it came to be and find its instrument, the source of its music; to experience itself in us or through us. But most of all, and forever, the mystery and the wonder.... To record and memorialize that, why we are here at all.
From the first droplet of anything against the first bare surface, we were essential to something vast, rough, ahead of and behind us. Our present struggles and planet-wide dangers are no accident; they are an actual contour of creation.
We are charged with a huge responsibility to bring it home. And this is not just some insoluble crisis or a daunting array of dire contingencies. Nor is it a game for phony spiritual saviors and self-appointed gurus to grandstand, for soldiers to march to victory, on any world accompanying any star.
We have chosen this - that cannot be said enough. We are trying to rescue the "real," and we are neither its victims nor its paragons.
Yet, it is okay to be this happy, this afraid, this alone, this once. It is more than okay; it is an obligation. For it will all turn into something else, in fact can only, can only become, in exile in these amazing shapes, what they are.'
- Richard Grossinger, The Bardo of Waking Life
'Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.'
- Terrence McKenna
'There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened.'
- Douglas Adams
