The user of a calculator performs cognitive tasks in symbiosis with this device. The calculation is not performed solely by the user (who relies on the calculator), nor by the calculator (as it has to be operated by a skilled user who knows what operations to perform in what order). It is, instead, performed by a new symbiotic unit, a system composed of two mutually dependent functional units, human and machine.

They talk about virtual reality as some future technology that’s going to change everything. We’ve been living in a virutal reality for the past 6,000 years. I mean, look at cities like New York and London and Los Angeles. I mean, nature has disappeared. Everything you see is a human idea downloaded into material existence. It’s entirely virtual.

There are those who will say that the idea of humanity is an abstraction, subjective in character. It must be confessed that the concrete objectiveness of this living truth cannot be proved to its own units. They can never see its entireness from outside; for they are one with it. The individual cells of our body have their separate lives; but they never have the opportunity of observing the body as a whole with its past, present, and future.

The conquest of the world by man’s intelligence is primarily and basically a phenomenon of an ‘intensification of consciousness’ closely linked with the historical progress of civilization. Precisely in so far as they are forced together, the thinking elements, which we all are, undoubtedly increase, under the influence of inter-reflection, their power of individual reflection. Brought together as one whole, they can understand what a single one of them in isolation could never have succeeded in understanding.

You know that you aren’t anymore just the fragmented individual. You know that what you are deep down at the very center is something beyond time and change.

These notes bring to us our message of invitation. They eternally urge us to come out from the seclusion of our self-centred life into the realm of love and truth. Are we deaf by nature, or is it that we have been deafened by the claims of the world, of self-seeking, by the clamorous noise of the market-place? We miss the voice of the Lover, and we fight, we rob, we exploit the weak, we chuckle at our cleverness, when we can appropriate for our use what is due to others; we make our lives a desert by turning away from our world that stream of love which pours down from the blue sky and wells up from the bosom of the earth.

If there is a purely physical explanation of brain performance, then computerlike structures are in principle capable of precisely duplicating such performance.

We do not want to survive merely, or to survive so as to be tormented forever in hell. We want to survive interestingly, even elegantly.

An analysis of the evolution of complex, networked systems points to the general trends of increasing efficiency, differentiation, and integration. In society these trends are realized as increasing productivity, decreasing friction, increasing division of labor and outsourcing, and increasing cooperativity, transnational mergers, and global institutions. This is accompanied by increasing functional autonomy of individuals and organizations and the decline of hierarchies. The increasing complexity of interactions and instability of certain processes caused by reduced friction necessitate a strengthening of society’s capacity for information processing and control, i.e. its nervous system. This is realized by the creation of an intelligent global computer network, capable of sensing, interpreting, learning, thinking, deciding, and initiating actions: the “global brain.” Individuals are being integrated ever more tightly into this collective intelligence.

It is a mystery. It is not going to be reduced to the firing of synapses, or repressed sexual desires, or day’s residues, or anything like that. It is the very thing which all these religions are yammering about. It’s there. It’s real. I mean, if you think that the world is empty of adventure, then you just haven’t been hanging out with the right crowd.

A mechanical unification of the world has been demanding (and still demands) profound moral and ideological readjustments. It is, for example, being realized, slowly but steadily, that the fragmentary control of production and trade through irresponsible individual ownership gives quite lamentably inadequate results, that the whole property-money system needs revision very urgently, and that the belated recrudescence of sentimental nationalism largely through misguided school-teaching and newspaper propaganda, is becoming an increasing menace to world welfare. The old ideological equipments throughout the world are misfits everywhere.

The path toward planetary regulation should be approached with the utmost caution. After all, if you had a little dial to control your pulse rate, you would eventually find its use an onerous burden because what was once automatically regulated would demand constant attention. The same applies to global climate. Until Metaman has evolved to the point where it can create a self-regulating planetary system as robust as the one which now exists, its best interests lie in protecting the “natural” systems that have worked so well.

Man is as much attached to nature as a tree, and though he walks freely on two legs and is not rooted in the soil, he is by no means a self-sufficient, self-moving, and self-directed entity.

The development of higher complexity along the axis of phylogeny requires conservative information storage which permits each step to build on the achievements of the former steps. Genetic communication works with such a conservative storage as does generally all genealogical communication over many generations. Sociocultural genealogy uses the outer storage facilities of buildings, scripts, and works of art. They contribute to the phylogeny of the neural mind.

When you have this terrifying urgency to go on—and feel you must, this is important, this matters—we screen out of our consciousness the fact that this is our own volition and our own game. Because we are captivated by the illusion of the necessity and the importance of going on, to keep other people going on, to keep children going on, to keep this thing up. And the difficulty is that, as we become disturbed and anxious about this, it’s more difficult to keep the game going. In proportion, as we are frightfully concerned to survive, we start fighting other people. We start clobbering our neighbors who are stealing our crops and whatever it is. All the old fights start. And it is these fights which (more than anything else at the moment, you see) are endangering the entire human project—but all based fundamentally on the illusion that it’s utterly important that we survive.

One could begin to dream of a world in which nature was seen as alive, in which the imagination permeated all reality, in which animals and plants are seen as part of the living texture, the living components, the cells, and the life of Gaia, and Gaia in the life of the cosmos as a whole.

The point of it is itself! It has no point beyond itself. It’s there. It’s arrived. It’s in a complete present, it is here and now. And that’s what it’s all about.

The most verisimilar analogy to God is not the economist, the politician, the lawyer, the legislator, the technician, or the priest. It is the artist, and it could not be otherwise, as it is the artist who is end-oriented while the others are means-oriented.

In yoga there is a very good kind of a saying, which says: “If you have one eye on the goal, you will have only one eye to find your way, which is very inefficient.” So you’re rendering yourself incapable of life simply because you want to get somewhere.

If you don’t have a philosophy of the ground—as most people today don’t—you tend to disintegrate and you become victim of anxiety.

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

The whole of human society can be like Gaia, which is highly dispersed. I take Gaia to be the synergy of biota, atmosphere, marine and fresh waters, soils, and rocks—a whole whose organizational properties we are just beginning to explore.

We’re trying to get a grip on who and where we are in the cosmos from a point of view not that of the American consumerist citizen. Something else—something larger, deeper, broader, more touched by the cosmic, more touched by a sense of the past and of destiny.

All of our problems have arisen because of our acceptance that it is possible for us to understand the reality of the world, or the reality of our existence. What I am saying is: you have no way of experiencing anything that you do not know. So anything you experience through the help of the knowledge we have is fruitless. It is a lost battle.