Em

“I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself.”
― Rudy Rucker, The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes

“A day, whether six or seven ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in the present Now-moment.”
― Rudy Rucker, The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes

“We talked a little set theory, and then I asked him my last question: “What causes the illusion of the passage of time?”
Gödel spoke not directly to this question, but to the question of what my question meant — that is, why anyone would even believe that there is a perceived passage of time at all.
He went on to relate the getting rid of belief in the passage of time to the struggle to experience the One Mind of mysticism. Finally he said this: “The illusion of the passage of time arises from confusing the given with the real. Passage of time arises because we think of occupying different realities. In fact, we occupy only different givens. There is only one reality.”
― Rudy Rucker, The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes

“For ages, when philosophers talked about the core of man they referred to it as his "essence," something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found; man's peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death