The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence

All our suffering is associated with this pre-occupation. All loss and gain, pleasure and pain arise because we identify so closely with this vague feeling of selfness that we have. We are so emotionally involved with and attached to this self that we take it for granted.

As Buddhist teachers often point out, knowledge, in the sense of prajña, is not knowledge about anything. There is no abstract knower of an experience that is separate from the experience itself.

[M]any people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our consitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world.

When a living system is suffering from ill health, the remedy is found by connecting with more of itself.

The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine.