Goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you’re not going somewhere, you’re already there. On the telephone, you’re not going somewhere, you’re there!

Huge vistas of possibility space are yet to be discovered right here on Earth. The civilizations and cultures have only recently bumped into one another around the whole sphere. The arrows can test synergies between humans and computers, humans and nature, and humans together in kinds of groups scarcely imagined.

If I were to end this lecture by handing out doses of psilocybin I would be gently taken by the elbow and led away forever. The Western mind is particularly phobic of this subject. We have bent our laws so that people can jump out of airplanes in the pursuit of thrills, so that they can bungee-cord off major highway bridges and freeway overpasses—so concerned are we to fulfill society’s need for thrills. But this is something else. It provokes all kinds of alarmed reactions.

We foretaste the future in every act composing our lives: the meal we will consume, the journey we will take… We plan these events and we sense them before, at times years before, they become the present. This foretaste is often better than the real thing. The present becomes, thus, the prefuture and this prefuture is the context in which we act, whenever we act as self-conscious creatures.

That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now, as I have said, common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question. Asked whether life is going anywhere at the end of its transformations, nine biologists out of ten will today say no, even passionately.

Viewed toward the past, this scheme of unification of past experience appears like a tree and indeed we speak of an ancestral tree.

The one metaphor that is perhaps least helpful in thinking about cyberspace is—unhappily—the one that has gained the most currency: The Information Superhighway. Can you imagine a phrase less descriptive of the nature of cyberspace, or more misleading in thinking about its implications?

We do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.

The great exhibit which we must always keep in front of ourselves and our critics is the mystery of the human mind and body. No one knows how it is that I can command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that. That’s mind over matter. That’s the violation of every scientific principle in the books, and yet it is the most trivial experience any of us have.

The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening. If you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you. Just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were listening to music. Don’t try to identify the sounds you are hearing, don’t put names on them, simply allow them to play with your eardrums.

You can look at our taboos: we have no taboo against pictures of people being tortured and murdered, which are very unpleasant, but we do have a taboo against pictures of people making love. Why? We have the feeling, you see, that everything to do with the glowing, flowing, glorious, warm participation of life is slightly sickening.

No one can exist who is not in relation to the common world.

There is no ‘you’ to hang on to it. In other words, all clinging to life is an illusory hand grasping at smoke.

Exploiting and destroying your environment, polluting the water and the air and everything is just like destroying your own body. The environment is your body.

In the energy band and under conditions conductive to the types of macroorganization found in biological life, the laws of physics become accentuated in particular ways by a hierarchy of coordinative levels ranging from dissipative structures at the molecular level and within cells to bio-organisms, societies, ecosystems, and beyond. Even “mind” may now perhaps be understood as a higher-level coordination of the same processes which, at other levels, appear as “matter;” thus a duality vanishes that has long haunted Western thought.

Calculating the percentage of Metaman’s energy involved in information processing would be difficult, but the demands this activity will make on Metaman’s metabolism will eventually be very high. After all, our own brains use about a quarter of the total calories we consume!

The principle of self-reproduction, which is of decisive importance for life, is not based on matter transfer, but on information transfer. To be precise, it is process programs which are transferred and which provide guidance for the formation of structures—not only material structures but also structures of relations and processes—in other words, dynamic space-time structures.

I think that if we could get a considerable number of people who are doing this, who are able to do this, they would be able to really think together. See, ordinarily, people can’t think together. Each one has his own opinion which is based on his own conditioning. And people really pay very little attention to each other when they try to think together, right? If, say, ten or twenty or thirty people could really think together with one mind, I think they would liberate a tremendous energy which would affect the others.

We stand at an extraordinary juncture in the history of life. Metaman is the greatest advance in living systems in some 700 million years, and life on Earth is entering a new phase of its history.

The future will be largely determined by two factors, besides others. One concerns the progressive weakening of control hierarchies with respect to human systems as well as the accompanying abandonment of the idea of a single, monolithic cultural guiding image. The other factor concerns the strengthening of the autonomy—that is to say, of the consciousness—of subsystems.

Evolution, starting from present-oriented physical and chemical structures, gradually integrates the past in biological development and the future in neural development into the life processes of the individual systems. It is interesting that neural (sociocultural) evolution re-enacts the integration of the past into the present at a new level—and not in the same sequence as biochemical and biological evolution.

Buddha’s teaching speaks of Nirvana as the highest end. To understand its real character we have to know the path of its attainment, which is not merely through the negation of evil thoughts and deeds but through the elimination of all limits to love.

In the last twelve months there has been more change compressed into time than in the previous twenty years. And those twenty years have more change in them than the previous hundred years. And that hundred years had more change in it than the previous thousand years. And that thousand years had more change in it than the previous ten thousand years. But science tells us this is meaningless. This is not a real, legitimate phenomenon that you’re talking about. You’re just lining up facts to make it appear as though there is an attractor. To make it appear as though the human historical enterprise is about to run itself into a stone wall, or off a cliff, or into another dimension.

He who hates does not know God, but he who loves has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.