1. “We normally think that we have our whole lives to accomplish this work, but the fact is that our energy for transformation will have dissipated itself by the time we are older.”
  2. “Contrary to popular belief, inner transformation does not produce behavioral and psychological results that can be easily recognized from outside.”
  3. “What do we actually need to know about alchemy? Awakening of the machine produces transformation, and transformation is reflected in alchemical resultes in the machine.”
  4. “We must have completed the transformational process before we run out of the resilience and flexibility required to complete the alchemical process of transformation.”
  5. “The veil is in the mind not the heart.   Only the heart will lift the veil.”
  6. “The pitiful truth is that very few people, even very famous and highly acclaimed directors of work communities, actually know the basic fact of work: that only an awakened machine can produce a transformational effect upon the essential self – that part of us which is not the machine..”
  7. “How can a man go through his entire life without seriously questioning everything he has ever been told about himself and his world?”
  8. “When we awaken a higher learning process, we no longer exhibit confusion and disorientation in the macrodimensions.”
  9. “Alchemy is a discipline in which an individual uses that machine to refine different substances, combining and separating and processing them by various means, over a long period of time, through the use of slow heat- by which is meant the application of inexorable and unwavering attention-producing a chemical and electrical mutation of the machine which is only a reflection of a much deeper internal mutation of the essential self.”
  10. “It is a terrible waste of opportunity of human life, a genuine sin, to have failed to use the human biological machine for our possible evolution.”
  11. “Although it has countless inner subjective states which may give the impression of an unapproachable complexity, the human biological machine has only two definite objective states which are of any real interest to us in the transformational sense. The machine is either in the waking state or the sleeping state.”
  12. “The education of the universe, one idiot at a time!”
  13. “Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention.”
  14. “We are in a way victims of several diseases of civilization, one strong symptom of which is the characteristic intellectual arrogance of our present culture. Intellectual arrogance can be defined as the assumption that we fully understand an idea the first time we hear it, just because we happen to recognize the words and think we understand their deep, subtle meanings.”
  15. “We must keep in mind that our real aim is not transformation. Transformation is a stepping stone to the Work, a special way of life which is possible for us only after our essential selves have been transformed, and our machines are more or less stable in the awakened state.”
  16. “While in the human form we take upon ourselves all the attributes, aspects and knowledge of a human being. If the machine has been dead (sleeping)  during our passage through it, when we leave it at the end of life, we lose everything, all the knowledge and all the experience we have accumulated.”
  17. “If we were to follow the indications of alchemy, trying to artificially produce alchemical results directly in the machine without the deeper internal change of which they are only a reflection, we would not see real results; just changing the temperature of the thermometer does not change the temperature of the body.”
  18. “If we can sense that the machine is asleep, we have taken the first real step toward awakening it.  Until then, everything in our lives, especially our work, is imaginary, just fantasy.”
  19. “The force of attention of the essential self is slow and subtle. The subtle force of attention is our only weapon against sleep. It is a very effective weapon if we are able to see that because it is subtle, it has to be applied unremittingly, unwaveringly, over a very long period of time.”
  20. “There’s a state of exhilaration which is a false waking state. It’s so close to the real waking state that it’s almost undetectably different. However, there is a definite difference between the state of exhilaration and the waking state of the machine.”
  21. “How is it possible that a man never asks himself what his real purpose for existence might be?”
  22. “It takes a long time to develop vision, but with proper training and a solid conceptual framework one can learn to see in different categories.”
  23. “Unknowingly, we voyage in a labyrinth, a macrodimensional maze of living electrical force, cloaked by a thick layer of ordinary life.”
  24.  “Our knowledge of the environmental world is entirely dependent upon synaptic processing of organic perceptions which come to us at the speed of light; still this is not fast enough to be in the present.”
  25. “Organically bound perceptions can provide us with the possibility of direct, unfiltered views of the real world, unencumbered by the brain and its significances.”