Just as the north and south poles are united by the magnet, so the individual and the universe are inseparable.

We are out of control. We are, basically, severely addicted to things and cannot stop ourselves. And we know—or we should know—that there is not enough petroleum, heavy metal, so forth and so on in the planet to give all the thing-addicts all the things that we know they must have in order to be happy. We have spread this intellectual virus from pole to pole, to Turkmenistan and Borneo, to the upper Amazon and to the Tajiks. Everybody wants kids, you know? Everybody wants the pause that refreshes. What are we going to do about this?

To understand anything, you have to understand it at many levels. You need a very simple way of looking at the thing as a whole; you need a more complicated way of looking at middle-level parts; and you need a great many very small theories at the bottom.

Perception operates only upon difference. All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference.

What is your relationship to another when “tomorrow,” psychologically, is not there?

The function of the world wide web is to unite our independent spirits and intelligences in a universal mind of the world, which has a higher intelligence than our present social order. That’s the possibility of the cyborg; of the human and the machine in essential partnership.

The metaphor, the model, to hold in your mind as you gaze at the Earth in its travail is the metaphor of birth, not death: that a gestation process of 20,000 years is coming to an end. Culture-using, language-using, minded creatures are coming to some kind of fermentative climax. And we cannot extrapolate the human career on this planet centuries into the future. It ain’t gonna to be like that.

The manifest property of living matter to form a system in which ‘terms succeed each other experimentally, following constantly increasing degrees of centro-complexity.’

Exploration is not only self-validating; it also seems in human beings to be addictive.

You are the laws of the universe.

The folly with a secretive intent of the solar system has been to pollute the terseness of space with bundles of mass-energy in a gravitational, electromagnetic net, the planets.

There really is no necessity to go on living.

Every nerve end in your body is alive and aware, every organ is functioning without your thinking about it. And that’s you.

As biology and technology are becoming ever more tightly united within Metaman, they are uniting with human beings as well.

The universe is a complexity-conserving engine. Whatever complexity it achieves by any means, it makes that the platform for a further thrust into deeper complexity.

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

The combination of accelerating acceleration and ephemeralization has now elevated 60 percent of all humanity from its year-1900 99-percent poverty level into realization of an everyday standard of living superior to that enjoyed by any kings, tycoons, or other power-commanding humans prior to the twentieth century.

Is not something, itself analogous to a brain, being produced within the totality of human brains? When we think about means of communication, we notice most of all their commercial side; but the psychological side is much more important, and brings with it far-reaching effects.

By moving beyond the constraints of previous “biological” materials and evolutionary mechanisms, Metaman is moving life into an entirely new realm.

I think the reasonable response is to push the art pedal right through the floor. The way to escape the present cul-de-sac is an enormous outbreak of creativity of all sorts. We just need to overwhelm ourselves with creative expression. This could be very easily done. We’ve been in the habit of binding about 60% of our social energy into a standing crop of weapons, and whatever creativity is expressed in the production and design of these weapons, it goes on behind closed doors in the most excessively testosterone-festered environment you can possibly imagine, which is a military weapons research laboratory. But if we weren’t caught up in that, if we could really direct the resources the way we want, we have no idea how rich we are—and how perverse our distribution of resources is. I mean, a single F-16 fighter plane, standard equipage, costs 120 million dollars. One of these fighter planes! They order them in lots of 500. If somebody were to give 120 million dollars to the New Age—define that any way you like— (or to me, or to you), that’s a lot of money! But if you spend it on a fighter plane, it’s not a lot of money. You can park a fighter plane in an area twice the size of this room and there it sits—useless unless Armageddon should come along. It’s about the most useless thing you could do with 120 million dollars. And yet, if you gave that to the sincere, the insincere, the half-sincere and let them all go off and do with it what they want, society would be a much richer place and many more interesting possibilities would be developed.

Our knowledge, vision, and power have expanded to previously unimagined levels. To the ancients, unleashing a storm, healing the sick, leveling a city, or foretelling the future would have been ample demonstration of divinity. Now, having seen equivalent powers in Metaman, we might inquire how the “miracles” were performed rather than falling to our knees. Flight, television, a corneal transplant that restores sight, even high explosives would once have been considered godlike. Now we take them for granted. Knowing more, seeing more, having greater powers than any who have gone before, we—through Metaman—have in a sense become as gods. And yet we are “gods” only in the limited terms of early humans, because Metaman’s emergence is giving us an awareness of the true enormity and power of the universe.

When you reach a certain point of despair, when you know that you are the one weird child who will never be able to swim, at that moment you’re swimming. Because the desperation and the total inability to do it at all has brought you to a point which we might call “don’t care.” You stop trying. You stop not trying; trying to get it that way. You just have arrived at the insight that your decision, your will, doesn’t have any part in the thing at all. And that’s what you needed to know. You’ve overcome, you see, the illusion of having a separate ego.

The unity in the parts of the individual consciousness is a very profound one. Yet, it cannot render the mind self-sufficient, for the individual mind and its parts are always relative to something beyond themselves and is, therefore, dependent for its meaning and existence. In order that the mind may maintain a permanent existence it must be a member of the ultimate unity, and in order to do so, it must contain within itself the entire system of minds and yet permanently contrast itself with all other members. It must be at once federal and individual.

I think that the design process—whatever that means—must become conscious, global, integrated. The entire human domain (which means the entire planet and its surrounding near space) should be enclosed and included in a coherent plan driven by human values and a thirst for transformational beauty.