Ray Kurzweil Quotes

Another very common use, in all cultures, of psychoactive substances is to give people transcendent experiences. To allow them to transcend their human and ego boundaries to feel greater contact with the supernatural, or with the spiritual, or with the divine, however they phrase it in their terms.

It doesn't necessarily matter if I'm onstage or not. I just find the communal experience of a rock concert, or any type of music performance, achieves a kind of transcendence that I associate with spirituality. It's the closest thing to what I think people expect church to be like. Or maybe just what I've always thought church should be. You lose yourself, and at the same time come to the realization or understanding that you're part of something bigger than yourself.

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere

The body was so little a part of him that its final stillness seemed nothing of importance. He was half out of it anyway and death was only a slipping out of it altogether and being at last what he always was, a spirit. We buried the pearly shell upon the mountain top.

A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love.

I love Osho. I don't know if you would call him a philosopher; I would just call him a really cool dude. Osho really changed my life. Because the way that he spoke about emotion and the male and female energies in the world and how people react to the world around them, it's so simple, yet it has such a depth.

the material world and the flesh are only temporary - there are no sins of the flesh, spirit is everything!

Remember God so much that you are forgotten. Let the caller and the called disappear; be lost in the Call.

Is evolution just another name for God?

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.

God is bigger than the Christian faith.

I believe that evidence shows that there is a real spirit, a real Beach, but it is beneath no pavement whatsoever, for all pavements arise within it: Spirit is all-encompassing. It transcends everything, it includes everything.

If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.

By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.

We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

Our heart always transcends us.

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

Rather than be afraid of evolution and try to stifle inquiry, people should revel in the joys of knowing and find a serenity and a joy in being a part the rest of life on Earth. Not apart from it, but a part of it.

You know what, evolution is a myth. ... Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?

It’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.

[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

‎"Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is."

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason