Most 20th century academic physicists, and academia as a whole, simply did not want to touch the subject of consciousness. We have seen psychology grow up, and we've seen the development of neurophysiology and other much more sophisticated science, but only in the recent years have the tools of quantum mechanics been applied to anything representing human scale size.

Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach.

The ancient traditions, even Christianity, say God is Love. There is symmetry here. The fundamental step where you get into this transcendent state is this feeling of ebullience, love and caring and unity.

We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.

The universe is a self-organizing, intelligent, creative, trial-and-error learning, participatory, interactive, non-locally interconnected and evolving system.

I think our science is a marvelous tool. Of course it has its politics, its failings, its mistakes, like all other human endeavors, but I think the methodology of our science - using it to postulate and to use the proper approach of creating falsifiable hypotheses and then testing them to see if they ring true, and then progressing by finding the anomalies to our theoretical structure, and then improving our theoretical structure to take care and test the anomalies - is the way to go, because that helps us discover what the universe.is all about and our relationship to it.

So, we've gone from covered wagons to going to the moon in just under 100 years. For all the centuries and thousands of years before us, people walked or rode horses, cows, camels or whatever. This so-called modern era, from the late 19th century through now, has been the period of the most amazing development, discovery, innovation and acceleration of change that humans have ever experienced. And it hasn't slowed down yet.