With a good enough interface, there should not really be a border between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ thought processes: the one would flow naturally and immediately into the other.

How are we going to save this planet? How are we going to take the lethal cascade of toxic technological and ignorance-producing habits that are loose on this planet and channel them toward some kind of a sane and livable world? Well, the answer is emerging in culture out of the collectivity of global consciousness. It is what I call the archaic revival. It is this very large turnover in the mass mind; some people call it a paradigm shift. It’s an effort to recover the sensory ratios, the feelings, and the attitudes of 15,000 to 20,000 years ago—before fear, before ego, before male dominance, before hierarchy, hoarding, warfare, propaganda, child abuse, all of these things. And the answer lies—as was indicated last night—in integration into the dynamics of nature.

We forget that speed is only of real advantage to you if you’re the only person who has it. Then you can get ahead of other people. But the minute everybody else catches up with you, you’re all back where you were, only going much faster and much more nervously; going, as it were, faster and faster to less and less desirable objectives. We hurry everything we do: we make our products, our houses, our furniture, our clothes so that they become obsolete quickly. We’re in such a hurry to get everything done. We pay attention to the front rather than the back.

By the capital event of hominization the most “advanced” part of the cosmos found itself personalized. This simple change in a variable introduced for the future a two-fold condition of existence which cannot be escaped. Since everything in the universe, starting from Man, takes place in the personalized being, the ultimate Term of the universal Convergence must also possess (in a supreme degree) the quality of a Person.

Language is so magical because it allows individual brains to connect, like neurons, to form a larger thinking system. If a human’s Inner Self is like a neuron, the Outer Self’s ability to express itself gives the neuron its axons, and its ability to see or listen to the expression of others gives it dendrites. These channels let individual human brains combine together to form a larger communal brain. Humans can form brains of all different sizes, depending on the number of people communicating with each other. There’s no limit on how large a brain humans can meld into. In human societies, vast interconnected gossip networks, with the help of tools of mass broadcast, allow thousands of communal brains to quickly connect, turning huge portions of a society into giant thinking systems.

You finally figure out that it’s only the clock that’s going around… it’s doing its thing, but you—you’re sitting here right now, always.

Consciousness may be, somewhat ironically, the solution to general intelligence. This is because epistemic depth facilitates a kind of cognitive bootstrapping. As an agent becomes aware of its own knowledge and cognitive processes, it can begin to self-optimize and self-refine them, leading to ever-increasing levels of intelligence and adaptability.

There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.

McLuhan—who’s a very interesting figure as a radical thinker in communications theory, and a devout Catholic—believed that the manifestation of the Holy Ghost was electricity. And to him the ringing of the planet by electronic media was the enfolding arms of an archangel. I mean, he literally saw electricity as God’s love made manifest. And he may not—he hasn’t been proven wrong yet. I mean, it may yet knit us all together, and make us one, and lift us off, and send us to the stars. It’s some wonderful stuff, electricity.

Because of the birth of consciousness within a quite possibly meaningless universe, and because consciousness is mind-full of values, reality might now be seeking and pursuing meaning.

We have cells inside of us that are alive, and we feel like we’re alive. But we don’t often think about the societies that we’re embedded in as alive, or a global-scale organization of us and our technology on the planet as alive.

As we take control of our genetic heritage, as we take control of the process of manufacturing culture, we are going to become what we dream we are. And we have never really explored consciously what it is we dream we are. But very shortly this will become a major part of the cultural agenda, because we are going to be able to do anything.

I really see technology as having a role in all of this. I don’t see it as demonic. The only purpose of history—if it has a purpose—must have been the acquisition of technology. Because it’s the only advantage that we’ve gained, if it is an advantage. And I really believe it is. I think that we must transform ourselves. We are not in control of our destiny. A planetary birthing process is underway. This planet will be unrecognizable in a hundred years. And so it’s not about managing or controlling this process, it’s simply about submitting to it.

From west to east, from Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo to London, Moscow, and New York, what is dreamed of—the web that is being woven—the bone of contention—among technicians of all sorts, is nothing less than plans for a general re-casting, which will hold good for the whole earth: a ‘new order,’ a ‘new life.’

We have the whole thickness of the earth to handle and exploit. We have only the thin unstable skin of topsoil, and the seas, to procure for us the biological energies indispensable for life.

We are the first species to begin to understand: not only are we aware of evolution, but we are evolution! We are evolution in person.

The entity we call a cow is an organism whose complex ecosystem of gut symbionts—a diverse community of cellulose-digesting bacteria, ciliated protists, and anaerobic fungi—informs its specialized anatomy, defines its plant-digesting physiology, regulates its behaviors, and ultimately determines its evolution.

The problem with human beings is that we ride very close to a kind of bifurcation point in terms of whether our loyalty is transferred to the group or to the individual. And this can be sent either way. I mean, if there were to be landslides at both ends of highway 1 and a food shortage, we would coalesce marvelously into a survival machine where we would all place group values higher than our own needs—and nobly so. This would happen. But in situations of abundance and non-scarcity, it’s like a slime mold without the formality of coherency. We just then dissolve into this sort of every-man-for-himself egocentric style.

Mind is a phenomenon of metabolic activity. So far as we know, where there is not metabolism, there is not consciousness. Even computers—they have to have a flow of electrons in their guts. When there’s no electrons flowing, there’s no computation taking place. Similarly for us: when there is no flow of electrons, no charge transfer, then you’re dead. You know? And there’s no coming back from that. But if you have had children, look what’s happened: half of your information has been kept alive in the non-equilibrium thermodynamic state of the dissipative structure which is the species, you see?

On the platform of cellular evolution arose higher animals, complex ecosystems. On the platform of that arose early human culture. Upon that platform rose late human culture—including ourselves, including technology. My point here that I want to try to sell you on is that nature is a novelty-conserving engine of some sort. That, far from being a random process driven toward entropy by the second law of thermodynamics, nature is a process of complexification. That, whenever this process is dealt a blow, it immediately sets out to recover and surpass whatever previous level of complexification it had attained.

You remember what happened in the Garden of Eden? God set a trap by saying: there is that specific tree, and you mustn’t eat the fruit of it. If he had really not wanted them to eat the fruit, he wouldn’t have said anything about it. But by drawing attention to it in this way, it was obvious they were going to eat it.

Although it might seem initially farfetched, the creation of a hivemind society has some plausibility. It is possible for humans to be highly rationally integrated with one another, sharing the same intentions, plans, and goals, and coordinating together to achieve them. Technology is facilitating more extensive forms of rational integration. Furthermore, with current technology, it may soon be possible for humans to be highly phenomenologically integrated. Would high degrees of both forms of integration be desirable?

You realize that what you love when you love yourself is always some other object than yourself. You like eating ice cream. You like beautiful views. You like your house. You like your friends. You like kissing beautiful girls. You like this. But it’s all not me! See? You suddenly realize you can’t separate your self that you love from everything else that your self implies. Then, you know, you begin to wonder which end is up. But it soon clarifies, and you suddenly see the whole thing—and this can become with psychedelics a very, very vivid thing—the whole universe as a colossal energy play going this way and that way, totally indestructible, and it’s all you, and you didn’t know it. It doesn’t mean you’re the only one. This thing proliferates in millions and millions of centers, but it’s all one center. And you can get the physical sensation of the thing being an enormous, as it were, sort of center of light: of joyous, whooping, glorious, loving BOOM, like that. And this will only usually last for a few moments, where you feel you’ve actually put your finger on the center of reality. And it’s this tremendous luminous energy. Just beautiful!

Randomness and creativity conspire to create rigid structures: consciousness creates subjective reality!