You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays.

Are you here; recollected? See, most people aren’t. They’re bothering about yesterday and wondering what they’re going to do tomorrow, and aren’t all here. That’s a definition of sanity: to be all there. So to be recollected is to be completely alert, available for the present. Because that’s the only place that you are ever going to be in. Yesterday doesn’t exist, tomorrow never comes. There is only today.

One of the strongest effects that I had from the use of psychedelics was a vastly renewed appreciation of this dimension of the natural world; a kind of perception that the whole world is pattern.

Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth-century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the “public”) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

Creating a diverse yet equitable and intercommunicating world calls for more than just paying lip-service to equality and just tolerating each other’s differences.

The complementarity of stochastic and deterministic factors, of novelty and confirmation, reappears at a new level.

Nobody can imagine what consciousness is. It’s the most elusive whatever-it-is that there is at all, because it’s the background of everything else that we know. Therefore, we don’t really pay much attention to it. We pay attention to the things within the field of consciousness: to the outlines, to the objects, to the so-called things that are in the field of vision, the sounds that are in the field of hearing, and so forth. But whatever it is that embraces all that, we don’t pay much attention to it. We can’t even think about it. It’s like trying to look at your head. You know? You try to look at your head and what do you find? You don’t even find a black blob in the middle of things. You just don’t find anything. And yet, that is that out of which you see.

For the last century these two ideologies, communism and free enterprise, have dominated the political affairs of world-around humanity. Each side says, “You may not like our system, but we are convinced that we have the fittest, fairest, most ingenious way of coping with the lethal inadequacy of life support operative on our planet, but because there are those who disagree diametrically on how to cope, only all-out war can resolve which system is fittest to survive.”.

We alive today might be standing on the threshold of an evolutionary development as significant as the emergence of life on Earth some 3,500 million years ago.

The metaphysical experience is a very preponderant one. All that is going on in this room between you and I has been metaphysical. What we might call “understanding” is utterly metaphysical. There are no arrows, there is nothing going on to really weigh or indicate, really, understanding. I find it is a very extraordinary matter. I can see your eyes physically, and your eyes will communicate to me as my tongue can wag and make sounds in the air waves, which gives you some kind of words, and so forth. But the understanding is not physical.

If we seek the living whole, the Specimen that is truly self-contained and self-maintaining, nothing short of the entire network of terrestrial organisms, growing up as one living thing, deserves such a title. And even this huge biosphere is still far from being complete. For without its core of rock and water and topsoil, and its envelope of air, it is as dead as the least of its ingredients. In short, nothing less than the whole Earth is truly alive. Here indeed is a visible goddess.

If humanity sets itself some goals which are incompatible with further integration of individuals, the result will be an evolutionary dead end.

The Earth is not, as it is in a Western worldview, a potentially harmful place made up of “inanimate” or “dumb” matter. She is alive, but different from human life forms.

Since the emergence in our consciousness of the ‘sense of evolution’, it has become physically impossible for us to conceive or worship anything but an organic Prime-Mover God, ab ante.

No longer simply a religion of individuals and of heaven, but a religion of mankind and of the earth—that is what we are looking for at this moment, as the oxygen without which we cannot breathe.

We must, however, reflect on what is happening. It is an urgent matter, especially for those of us who still live in a meaningful, even a numinous, earth community. We have not spoken. Nor even have we seen clearly what is happening. The issue goes far beyond economics, or commerce, or poetics, or an evening of pleasantries as we look out over a scenic view. Something is happening beyond all this. We are losing splendind and intimate modes of divine presence. We are, perhaps, losing ourselves.

Out of one system other completely new, never-before-imagined systems can arise.

I’m just shifting consciousness a little bit to say: let’s just stay open to what’s happening and find whether we can be peaceful in the process of change rather than in always resisting the change. Is this too weird?

It’s important, then, to understand that to some extent this is a hoax: that we believe that the future is what we’re responsible for and what we’re supposed to live for, and that we say of a thing which we don’t think is any good “it has no future.” Now, when you contrast that—which is absolute common sense to most people living in the Western world; it’s the future we’ve got to work for—contrast that with the Indian Hindu/Buddhist idea of time, wherein which they feel that in the course of time everything falls apart, and that therefore there is nothing to be hoped for from the future.

You want to live this? Resentment, blame, and judgment—they’ve got to go, and it doesn’t matter why you have them. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happened, it doesn’t matter who did it.

All minds in a single planetary effort.

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 intelligence of the plant is the same as the pattern of the plant. You shouldn’t think I would say the plant is the result of intelligence. The shape of it is the same as its intelligence. So the shape of your brain, the shape of your face, the whole structure of the culture you live in, the human interrelationships that go on—it is that pattern which is intelligence.

McLuhan understood this very well: he believed that the worldwide rise of electrical networks could be correlated to the descent of the Holy Ghost. He thought we were living in the age of the Holy Spirit; that electricity is the Holy Spirit. And that’s abstract when you’re talking about telegraphs and that sort of thing, but when you’re talking about the Internet you realize, you know: we really are mental creatures.