1.
[To deal with paranoia in your own head,] the first thing to do is cop that it’s possible that you’re being paranoid. The trouble with paranoia is, when you’re doing it, you don’t think you’re doing it. One way to know for sure that you’re having an attack of paranoia: You’re probably future-tripping. You probably have plans or anxieties about things that may or may not happen in the future, and you’re worrying about them. When you’re out in the future, the probabilities are thinner. It’s like a squirrel running out on the branches, and when the branches get thinner, it gets shakier. That shakiness can cause paranoia on its own – merely the probabilities getting shaky can make you paranoid. What you have to do is recognize that paranoia is not a real emotion – that it’s a nonsurvival trip, and you have to just let go of it. MNC51
2.
I think laughing is just free good karma. You know, all the time that you’re laughing, you’re wide-open, you’re nonlinear, nondirectional. It may be the highest form of communication that we can do by mouth. Somebody can drop your cut-glass vase on the floor, and you can laugh and it’s cool…. There’s a whole lot of things that are joyful to laugh about, and laughter itself I think is a joyful phenomenon. MNC70
3.
Freud says that humor is frequently hostile, is laughing at slipping on a banana peel and all that. But that’s only out of a head that’s basically neurotic because a head that is basically sane doesn’t doesn’t dig other people getting hurt…. That’s like saying people basically dig seeing people get screwed up, and I don’t think so. I think the laughter is to release a tension, because you see something happen and you can’t help it, you can’t do anything about it, you’re stuck with all this tension you have to release somehow. I don’t think that it’s always a hostile enjoyment of somebody getting hurt. MNC70
4.
The first thing to notice about impatience is that you’re dissatisfied with where things are at right now. If you’re dissatisfied with where things are at, you’re stuck with them – because the only way you’re going to change anything for the better is to accept it as it is right now. [You accept it by understanding it. 2005 ] Then from that place, you can work to make changes fractionally kronon to kronon. But it’s like hopping a freight train. You just can’t go and step up in front of a freight train, because it’s going to run you down. You have to run along beside it a little way, and match speeds with it, and jump onto it – and then, if you want to, you can pull the brake or go down and make a deal with the engineer. MNC77
5.
Everybody is responsible a little bit for somebody else’s trip, in the sense of how we choose to think of someone – whether we want to make them go up, or come down. How they rise and fall in our estimation affects them. But it also affects us – what other people think of us. That brings us to the level of manifesting each other to be the best possible ones of us we can have. MNC78
6.
As far as what comes on to us from the universe goes, we’re each one of us responsible for ourselves. One man, one karma is one of the basic axioms that we have to work with and live by. But, morally, we do have a great responsibility for other people. MNC78
7.
It’s important not to obsess on your magic too closely, but if you are serious about change, don’t be afraid to look at yourself in a mirror either, or to listen to your friends. Our culture has a horror of mirrors, and they put it on you that anytime you look in a mirror, there’s something you’re supposed to feel guilty about. MNC83
8.
But that’s not true. A mirror is a very good and accurate tool. It shows you, on the physical level, what you look like. You really ought to know how you look at that level – just for yourself. MNC83
9.
Keep in mind that everyone is beautiful if they have the juice turned on inside. It doesn’t have anything to do with the meat part. Everyone is beautiful if they’re lit up, because that’s what beauty is — being lit up from within. MNC83
10.
We [gentle people like us] have one big defense that’s as natural to us as a white rabbit’s fur in the snow. That is that we know what’s going on. That really helps a lot. MNC87
11.
When someone’s drunk, a lot of their consciousness is knocked out, and they’re running a lot on their subconscious. They’re pretty telepathic at that stage – drunks and kids and people like that. Don’t ever lie to them. MNC89
12.
You have to take control of yourself [in a challenging situation], because that’s the only variable in the situation over which you have control. You just take what variable that you do have control of and control it. Jesus said, “Be thou wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” MNC89
13.
I believe that a kid can be busted for bad vibes; he doesn’t have to say anything, just bad vibes, that’s all. Sometimes we put our kids in the bedroom and say, “you can come out when you can have some fun with us.” MNC139
14.
If your baby doesn’t want anything to do with you, one of you is on an ego trip, you or the baby. [By far, you are the more likely culprit. 2005] MNC139
15.
If a baby has been distracted, it can learn it doesn’t have to pay attention to anybody, and it won’t. MNC139
16.
Thing is, if you’re going to learn how to deal with kids, you got to learn how to come on strong without a bad vibe. Don’t think that you have to come on nasty, but you might have to come on strong, without any bad vibes in it, without any anger in it, without any guilt in it, without any blame in it, just a little noise, kid, to attract your attention. Then you have to reason with the kid. At this point it is good to remember that you also don’t want your kids to learn that they should knuckle under to juice. MNC140
17.
Isn’t that interfering with your kid’s free will? No, because of the question of responsibility. Responsibility means ability to respond. A child can grab off a larger chunk of free will than he is physically or intellectually capable of being responsible for. That means that a parent is responsible for the child’s karma. MNC140
18.
The thing about the responsibility of the kid is like the thing about the cat again you can let go of a cat in a land on his feet but you can throw a cat so hard that it can’t land on his feet — and then it’s not “its” cat anymore. It’s “your” cat. Well, the same thing in reverse corollary for a kid. You don’t give a kid the chance to decide whether he wants to drink rat poison or not. You see, a kid has free will, and he can decide whether he wants to drink a bottle of rat poison or not, but you don’t give him a chance to make that mistake because he hasn’t gotten any better knowledge than to drink it. MNC141
19.
If a kid gets to where he can’t pay attention to you, because you’ve lost his attention, then his attention’s just wandering, and out in the universe, and will fasten on any piece of interesting stuff that goes by, and then it’s off to the races, on a randomly programmed lifestyle. MNC140–143
20.
The idea is that you want the kids to know which way is up. If you stay in one-to-one truth contact with a kid, by telling them honestly what it is that they’re doing, and how it is that it affects you, honestly, all the time, then when they’re 15 or 16 years old they’re not strangers, they’re still your friends, they know what’s happening. That means you’re going to have to point which way is up and keep pointing that way until they catch on. MNC143
21.
We need to understand that the kingdom of God is within us, and that whether we get in communication with it or not is the choice of our own free will. They say, in Christianity, that you can sin against the Father and you can sin against the Son, but the worst sin is to sin against the Holy Ghost. Well, my understanding is that the Holy Ghost is that network of compassion that exists between all sentient beings – it’s that level where we’re just like the monkeys and we’re just like the dogs and just like the birds and the trees and the grass. MNC161
22.
If you shut yourself off, it might take you a long time to get open again. And you have to make a commitment to stay open and help other people stay open. MNC161
23.
The way you help other people stay open is to help them to relax. Don’t do things in ways that put other people uptight. Pay attention to the whole thing that’s happening around you. MNC161
24.
Like I’ve seen people sitting in a crowd this size decide that they were alone, man, and turn on the transistor radio real loud – like they were someplace else, and they were going to sit there and listen to the transistor radio all alone – while denying that palpable sense of oneness that was there – and is here. MNC162
25.
Using names and concepts like “emotion” and “personality” and “ego” is a pretty fancy way of describing how we move our energy around – for what we do to get our energy, and for how we put our energy out. Someone who takes in more energy than he puts out, people say, is full of ego. That just means that he’s mostly on input – takes in more energy than he gives back. MNC162
26.
Most of us would never think of coming up to somebody and hitting them with a real big, wide-open anger blast. Instead, we have a polite society and a refined culture where you can move your lip a quarter of an inch and just show one fang – you don’t have to do the whole thing. But it’s the same thing on the subtle plane. MNC162
27.
The subtle plane counts, too – you can’t have bullshit on the subtle plane either. If you’re going to get cool, it means body, speech, and mind. Every movement of your body is a mudra with meaning, that’s sent out and read by everybody’s subconscious. Every word you say has a deeper meaning than you think it does, that’s read by everybody else, as well as the one you intend. And every thought you think is telepathically shared by everyone else. MNC163
28.
If you’re going to get cool, and be cool, you have to know what your transactions are on every plane. You have to know what your telepathic transactions are, and you have to know what your mudric transactions are. You need to be aware of how you touch somebody, and of how somebody touches you. Like, do you pull away when you’re touched? MNC163
29.
You have to see yourself as others see you. That means you need other people’s help, because that’s who sees you. Prayer is the telepathic communication with your fellow human beings that you really are sincere in your desire to straighten up. And if you do communicate that, then your fellow human beings will help you in every way, and you will have what they call “good, karma,” or as they say it in English, “good luck” – personal karma being the accumulated credit-debit balance. MNC163
30.
If you succeed in plugging up the holes in your bucket, you can get high on your own energy. One person’s energy is enough, not just for one person to survive, but for one person to get high. And then you can get a lot of other people high if you work at it. If you get high from plugging up a hole in your bucket, and you start getting other people high too, you stay high — because it isn’t any fun to come down anymore. MNC163
31.
You don’t have to do anything to tear the system down, because the system is so corrupt it’s just falling down. You don’t have to tear it down – just stay out of the way. Just stay cool. Be friendly and nice. Be nice to the guy you buy gasoline from, because you might have to buy gasoline again, someday. MNC166–167
32.
The thing is, some people are afraid. They’ve been put uptight by a lot of strange things. They shouldn’t be put uptight. Nobody should be uptight, because it puts uptight energy into the universe and makes everybody a little more uptight. MNC167
33.
Defuse those [uptight] people – they’re only scary when they’re scared. You dig? They’re only scary when they’re scared. Don’t be scary. You don’t have to be scary. MNC167
34.
I’m not scary to folks I run into, and I look just as outrageous as anybody. But I’m not scary. You have to pay attention to the medium-message of how you come across to folks. You can be mostly any way you want to, as long as you’re not scary. MNC167
35.
But if you put people uptight, you’re going to carry a circle of uptight energy around you that sooner or later will be triggered into psychic or physical violence. MNC167
36.
I haven’t been hassled, and I haven’t been mistreated. Usually I get smiled at, and taken care of fast and efficiently. People at stores and places I deal with usually like to relate with me for a while. It’s because I work at doing that. If I see somebody who wants to ask me a question about our bus, like, “Where’d you get a bus like that?” I’ll stop and give them a five-minute rap about the old used bus lot. I’ll tell them how it works – and give them a handle to hang on to. MNC167–168
37.
If you have good vibes, people want to relate with you, and all you have to do is give them a handle. If you give them a handle, they’ll forgive reefer, they’ll forgive long hair, they’ll forgive funny talking, they’ll forgive new-age sex trips, they’ll forgive anything, as long as you’re not scary and on an ego trip. MNC168
38.
That’s why you can do anything you want to do in this world right now. You don’t need to make a revolution to do anything you want to do. I regularly do what I want to do. MNC168
39.
A person of ordinary intelligence in this country [USA] is about three-quarters crazy. Do you know that? To be an average citizen in this country is to be a little nuts. You can’t come on heavy to nuts to make them straighten up. You dig? MNC180
40.
Something you might do is that when an action or a deed or an idea comes up in front of your head for review to find out whether you are going to do it or not, pay attention to whether it’s a groovy thing to do before you do it. Only do groovy things, you know. You make a choice, it’s called free will. See, you make a choice and you have to perform an action, and it’s free will. MNC183
41.
The only kind of learning comes from actual experience. My girl walked up to a candle and looked at it very curiously for a long time, and she put up her hand and I knew she was going to touch it, and I had an impulse to say, “Don’t touch it.” Then I thought, But I’ll keep my mouth shut and see what happens. And it didn’t hurt her. She saw what it was quick enough to get back out of it before it really did her up, but she never touched it again either. And the word that meant fire-flame in her head had a referent that came in from another sense and was cross-indexed, it really meant something. If I had stopped her before she touched it, then the word fire would have had a referent of, “Last time I tried to do anything about it they said don’t do it.” C31OCT70
42.
We’re pretty durable, and we need to bump up against the universe a little bit to find out where it’s at. C31OCT70
43.
Also we need to bump up against each other a little bit. We shouldn’t think that we’re so fragile that we can’t lean on each other a little bit and interact kind of heavy and still be friends. C31OCT70
44.
Getting away from the small village idea has done a funny thing to the whole country, because in a small village, if a fellow turns up obnoxious one day he’s still going to be living there the next day, and he’s either going to have to straighten up or nobody’s going to talk to him anymore or something. He’s going to get cooled. But here in the city you can get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood, and get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood… and people get the idea that if you’re going to have to come on heavy to somebody to make them straighten up that they might not like you anymore, and they might move, and you’d never see them again or something. C31OCT70
45.
But we should all think that we’re all good enough friends — we’re all kind of like cousins anyway, we’re all the same kind of monkey — that we can say, “Hey, man, how about it,” once in a while, and the other fellow isn’t necessarily going to say, “Well I’m going to go home.” That’s another part of interacting, getting into that learning experience. We learn how we be by bumping against each other a little bit, and it’s a good deal all the way around to have a learning experience. C31OCT70
46.
Everybody has inside a fair witness who cannot be bribed, and who always knows what’s going on, and who always tells the truth, and anybody who is blowing it is overriding that fair witness and holding their hand over its mouth and gagging it while they’re doing that. C5NOV70
47.
[When people want to talk about their hassles, what to do] depends on whether it’s something constructive that’s going to end that particular hassle and get it over with. I’m not one to ever say that you shouldn’t ever hassle. If it comes out that you’re going to do a little thing right now and get it over with so you can go ahead, then do that. C5NOV70
48.
But if it’s somebody that’s just complaining… complaining gives you bad teeth, bad skin around your mouth, causes bad vibes, athlete’s foot… complaining can give you cancer, complaining can croak you. If people are complaining around you, you just hip them that it’s complaining, and it ain’t good for you. It just runs your energy backward. C5NOV70
49.
Here’s how it works: If you come on to the universe and say, “Thank you, universe, for everything you’re giving me,” the universe says, “Oh, somebody’s getting connected down there. Sock it to ’em.” But if you say, “Not enough, not enough, not enough,” the universe says, “Uh-uh, that one must not be getting in on it. Oh well, don’t send any over there, there’s nobody getting in on it anyway.” Complaining is the off button that turns off the manifestation. C5NOV70
50.
One of the heaviest things you can do is to assume the other person’s good will. That’s a really heavy piece of magic, because you can be in it up to your cars and if you can assume the other person’s good will he can have some good will, and then you can connect. C5NOV70
51.
There is no need to fear the sudden fear. That’s out of Proverbs in the Bible. There is no need to fear the sudden fear. If it’s been cool so far, it will be cool, and if it ain’t been cool so far, straighten up. C12NOV70
52.
Well everybody has free will at one point at least, which is, Are you going to straighten up or not? That’s the free will place. C12NOV70
53.
Oh yeah, I’m in love with hundreds and hundreds of people. I’m just completely in love with hundreds and hundreds of people at a time, and I’m always gassed when one of my girl friends gets married. C12NOV70
54.
I’m a householder yogi. A householder yogi is the hard kind. It’s a cop-out to go to a celibate monastery. Life is a puzzle and a riddle, and if you go to that kind of monastery that means, I give up. C12NOV70
55.
The really heavy thing is to try to stay stoned and do good and all that right there in the middle of it… right in with the family, make decisions like what are you going to do about your kids, and what do you do about your old lady. The way of the householder yogi is a hard goer. C12NOV70
56.
I also teach tantric yoga… that you can get high making love. And you’re supposed to be high making love. You can get telepathic and psychedelic making love. The way you do it is to keep at it long enough to build up some juice instead of blowing it for the flash in a couple of minutes. C12NOV70
57.
[How to deal with a situation where there is no reinforcement of the high that you feel in a group?] Do you have faith in God? You have faith in God, that’s what. You can’t take your reinforcement from the outside. Buddha says, “Seek no refuge outside yourself.” You’ve got to know you’re cool. The only way to know you’re cool is to have been cool. So if you ain’t been cool so far you better get cool, so the next time it comes up you can know you’ve been cool. C13NOV70
58.
[When you want to get straight with people,] here’s the secret, and this is what I get a whole bunch of my juice from: Everybody’s got the same fundamental assumptions. If you start at the right levels… like I find when I say everybody’s included, doesn’t put anybody out, all-inclusive, excludes no one at all, I can get everybody to buy that, because everybody says, “That’s good, there’s room for me, far out.” C13NOV70
59.
The way I’ve been getting along with folks on the road is I start off at places like that. I don’t start off with four-marriages and peyote tea. I start off at a place that anybody can do it, anybody can get enlightened. C13NOV70
60.
I don’t think anybody is so screwed up they can’t get enlightened, if you ever get to a place where you’re so screwed up you can’t get enlightened anymore, the universe notifies you. It’s the same way the electric company does. They cut off your switch. That’s how you know you can’t get enlightened in this life. But as long as you’re still alive you can still get cool. C13NOV70
61.
If your basic assumption is that somebody won’t get cool with you, that’s a shaky basic assumption. Your basic assumption should be that everybody will get cool with you if you be fair and straight with them. It may take a while. C13NOV70
62.
One of the heaviest pieces of magic you can do is assume the other person’s good will. I have looked at people when I was stoned and had them looking back at me with the cold Nazi fangs, if you know what I mean, and just flat out by an act of will manifested them groovy, because I couldn’t stand to look at them that way anymore. C13NOV70
63.
Pure perceivingness is refracted into six senses. In Buddhist psychology it’s six senses, not five: It’s the same five we have plus the sense of thought, which is perceived with the organ of the brain. Now here’s the thing about thought: This culture doesn’t know that thought is a sense. It thinks that thought is “I” because it doesn’t believe in God. And so in this culture they give you brownie points for braining all the time. You know, you get A’s on your papers for running through all those mental masturbations that you run through—term papers, rat torturings — and you get points for going out into brain so far that you lose compassion, right? If you can torture rats to death for the sake of thought, you must have lost compassion somewhere along the line. Braining all the time ain’t necessarily cool, any more than smelling all the time ain’t necessarily cool. C16NOV70
64.
Sometimes when I’m driving our schoolbus I’m steering the universe right down the road. I’ve got my body politic on, eleven foot high, fourteen thousand pounds, eight foot wide, going down the road, and I’m steering the universe, and I’m making decisions, right and wrong. That’s what you should do. C16NOV70-2
65.
Everybody knows what straighten up means; everybody knows what cool and uncool means. I a lot of people haggle over the details… try to find out is that during Lent or all the time… that kind of noise. Like straight means straighten up, you know, and cool means being cool, like loving your fellow man and resisting the temptation that I fell err [sic] to in Canada to take a piece off his ass on the way past. Everybody knows that kind of stuff, since that’s all part of the monkey rules. C22NOV70