In the last thousand years or so, inventions beginning with movable type printing have greatly speeded the flow of cultural information, and thus its evolutionary pace.

How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?

Technology is the principle or method(ology) employed in making the genetic structure of reality, and attaining the objective of equity and beauty (divinity). The making (the technology) of such genetic structure, the cosmo-gene-sis, will take all the time needed for the total metamorphosis of reality, and all the space (expanding and contracting) necessary for such metamorphosis to implement itself; and all the mass-energy available to structure and fuel the process. The fully concluded metamorphosis will imply the termination of time (change), the implosion of space into zero space, and the exhaustion of physical, mass-energy reality. This genesis involving the whole of reality is a cosmogenesis.

Fifty years from now, if an understanding of man’s origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, we shall not exist.

What’s wrong with the operating system that we have—Consumer Capitalism 5.0, or whatever it is? Well, it’s dumb! It’s retro. It’s very non-competitive. It’s messy. It wastes the environment. It wastes human resources. It’s inefficient. It runs on stereotypes. It runs on a low sampling rate—which is what creates stereotypes: low sample rates make everybody appear alike, when in fact the glory is in everyone’s differences. And the current operating system is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions—contradictions such as: we’re cutting the Earth from beneath our own feet, we’re poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behavior. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that’s making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior. Time to call a tech!

These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. It has the sound of epic myth. But it’s simply a description of the evolution of the cosmos as revealed by science in our time. And we—we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos—we’ve begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff contemplating the stars—organized collections of 10 billion-billion-billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth, and perhaps, throughout the cosmos.

Now is now. Are you going to be here or not? It’s as simple as that.

Every academic community requires the presence of a small minority of oddballs. If not, it’s sterile. See, we never really know who is crazy and who is a genius. Time tells. But at the time it’s very difficult to decide.

You can’t tell me that leaf doesn’t know where the sun is going to be. All of the leaves go just like that—what’s called heliotropism, turning toward where the sun is. That’s a form of consciousness. There is a plant consciousness. There is an animal consciousness. We share all of these things. You eat certain foods, and the bile knows whether there’s something there for it to go to work on. I mean, the whole thing is consciousness. I begin to feel more and more that the whole world is conscious; certainly the vegetable world is conscious. And when you live in the woods, as I did as a kid, you can see all these different consciousnesses relating to themselves.

Sound waves can be abstracted into phonemes, which can be abstracted into syllables, and then into words, sentences, biographies, and so on. This formulation allows for deep narratives about our experiences and our bodies across time, as well as goal-directed behavior, to emerge from the fundamental drive to maintain existence.

A man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice. His generosity may feed his ego, and his piety may feed his pride. So without love, benevolence becomes egotism, and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.

When the mind itself sees that thought is the creator of illusions, then you have an insight into the whole nature of illusions. It is that insight that is going to dissolve all illusions.

He has crossed the threshold of self-consciousness to a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some degree of conscious integration—integration of the self with the outer world of men and nature, integration of the separate elements of the self with each other. He is a person, an organism which has transcended individuality in personality. This attainment of personality was an essential element in man’s past and present evolutionary success: accordingly its fuller achievement must be an essential aim for his evolutionary future.

See, human beings are really a lot of tubes. And all living creatures are just tubes. And these tubes have to put things in at one end and let it out at the other. Then they get clever about it and they develop nerve ganglia on one end of the tube—the eating end—called a head. And that’s got eyes in it, it’s got ears in it, it’s got little organs—antennae and things like this—and that helps you to find things to put in one end so that you can let them out the other. Well, while you’re doing this, you see, the stuff going through wears the tube out. And so that the show can go on the tubes have complicated ways of making other tubes, who go on doing the same thing. In at one end, out the other. And they say, “Well, that’s terribly serious! That’s awfully important; we’ve got to keep on doing this.”

We are all in the same situation, having dissociated ourselves from our bodies and from the whole network of forces in which bodies can come to birth and live.

I don’t think you could discover consciousness if you didn’t perturb it. Because, as Marshall McLuhan said: whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn’t a fish. Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness, and yet we know it’s there. Well, the reason we know it’s there is because, if you perturb it, then you see it. And you perturb it by perturbing the engine which generates it, which is the mind/brain system resting behind your eyebrows. If you swap out the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion, then you see. It’s like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water: suddenly, the convection currents operating in the clear water become visible, because you see the particles of ink tracing out the previously invisible dynamics of the standing water. The mind is precisely like that, and the psychedelic is like a dye-marker being dropped into this aqueous system. And then you say, “Oh, I see! It works like this, and like this.”

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

This is really the central problem in Western thinking, I think: the tension between dualism and unity, and matter and spirit, and how do you handle it? I think that we are spiritualizing matter. This is what technology is: that the spiritualizing of matter is the highest expression of our technological output, and that this will become more and more what we are about. So that, in the next century, the difference between mind and brain and cell and machine will all have been subsumed under a new vocabulary, because we are hardwiring our minds, and we are making the artifacts of our culture intelligent, and we are breaking down the barriers between ourselves, between ourselves and larger databases, and this kind of thing, so that the old “I’m an ego inside a skin” definition gives way to some kind of much more malleable and plastic thing.

If you play in order to do better work, you’re not really playing. Because play is the kind of activity which does not have an ulterior motive. It is the kind of activity that is done for its own sake.

The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional, personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself be the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.

In the end it is the meta-adaptation, the adaptation to the total adaptive system, that is going to kill us or let us live.

What science would have you believe (and explicitly implies) is that we are an aberration. Over here you have nature: the beautiful rainforests, the wonderful coral reefs, the symmetry of the hummingbird, the sea urchin, and the butterfly. And here you have us: grimy, tawdry, polluting, ugly, driven, in disequilibrium, in denial. I don’t believe that. I believe that this kind of thinking that breaks humanity away from the rest of nature is the first of the great disempowering myths by which the Western mind has enslaved itself. And we are not outside of nature. We are not a runaway toxic process. We are not a mutation. We are, in fact, that part of nature which has been deputized for a purpose. We are the energy-gathering aspect of the Gaian mind. We are the language-forming capacity of Nature herself.

The great advantage in the latest method of human evolution lies in the fact that Man’s additional new limbs, like bows and arrows, have become detached. They never tie his arms to any exclusive advantage of efficiency.

The energy crisis will force us to do what we should have chosen to do long ago: put some yeast in our city-pancakes so as to thicken the life they can sustain. Such “levitation” will hasten, to a point, what I have referred to as the Urban Effect, a condition in which the vicarious, cooperative, inventive, social, cultural, creative propensities of wo-man can have a more favorable milieu in which to flourish and at a fraction of the price we now reluctantly pay or refuse to pay.