It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and naturally, hope there is no God. I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

We are an episode between two oblivions.

fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.

The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

The external view [of agency] forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.