The whole game we play with ourselves is: I am not responsible. A person can turn back to their parents and say, “You got me in this mess! You two, males and females, were having fun in bed together, and as a result of this, you irresponsibly created me. And you didn’t provide for me properly—you were economically unsound or something, and I blame you for all this!” See? What an alibi that is! But all life is based on this game. And nobody will admit, you see, that the evil gleam in your father’s eye, when he was after your mother, was you. That same surge of life was just the same as you are, see? You stated the problem, and you can’t just blame somebody else.

I think that the endgame of AGI is substrate agnostic. That means that AGI ultimately, if it is being built, is going to be smart enough to understand how AGI works. This means it’s not going to be better than people at AGI research and can take over in building the next generation, but it fully understands how it works and how it’s being implemented, and also of course understands how computation works in nature, how to build new feedback loops that you can turn into your own circuits. And this means that the AGI is likely to virtualize itself into any environment it can compute. So it’s breaking free from the silicon substrate and is going to move into the ecosystems, into our bodies, our brains, and is going to merge with all the agency that it finds there.

Let’s take, for example, cooking—a subject on which I have extremely authoritative prejudices. You can get so way out in refined sauces, and you can get into such incredible arguments about French wines and their comparable merits, and you can become a wine snob to the nth degree, until finally somebody suggests an entirely new approach, which is a very, very far out group of gourmets who are really hung up on water. You know? Water! It’s just the most beautiful substance! And all these people have so ruined their palates with these excessively refined foods, they can’t taste water anymore. And so the real in-school are the people who can taste water, see?

The planets are the cooled remnants of exploding stars. The elements in us and in our planets are stardust formed from supernovae.

It’s very hard to convince people of this by talking about it, because all talk, all systems of ideas, are in relation to reality itself somewhat like a menu in relation to a dinner. And those who try to get comfort—to get wisdom out of books or by believing in various systems of ideas and philosophies—such people are really devouring the menu instead of eating the dinner. Now how, then, is one to divert people’s attention from the menu to the dinner itself? There is only one way, and that is to point directly at the dinner: to stop talking about it, to stop writing about it, and to point at it directly.

We can will to relax our will. It is well known, particularly in the East, that this is possible. The powerful will of the West is destroying us as community and individuals. But it is open to each of us, at a deeper level, to say to the Ego, on its “higher” level, “You are to relax,” and it can, and may, obey. It is much to expect, and the mad will of the West must be overcome not only by mockery, but by revealing to every individual drowned in the current social drift his own utter insanity. He is doing what he does not, at bottom, wish to do. Beneath everything else he longs for a new way to enjoy life. He wants to live freely, to discover once again the joy of whole-natured living.

What could very well happen, if we’re lucky, is that we get integrated into something larger.

“It is raining.” What is this “it?” So how on Earth can one get a verb out of a noun? A process out of a thing? See, you just can’t do it. It’s the old problem, too, of spirit and matter: how can you get a spirit to influence matter? All good ghosts walk straight through brick walls without disturbing the bricks, so how can a ghost in your body lift an arm?

The world as things (spheres) connected by relations (tubes.)

What’s going on on this planet is absolutely unique so far a we know. It’s never happened before on this planet: intelligence emerging out of biological organization and actually having a shot at—what? Who knows! I mean, being itself is some kind of opportunity.

This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.

The waves of mind demand so much of Silence. But She does not talk back, does not give answers, nor arguments. She is the hidden author of every thought, every feeling, every moment. Silence. She speaks only one word. And that word is this very existence. No name you give Her, touches Her, captures Her. No understanding can embrace Her. Mind throws itself at Silence, demanding to be let in. But no mind can enter into Her radiant darkness, Her pure and smiling nothingness. The mind hurls itself into sacred questions. But Silence remains unmoved by the tantrums. She asks only for nothing. Nothing. But you won’t give it to Her because it is the last coin in your pocket. And you would rather give her your demands than your sacred and empty hands.

No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever-increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.

The noosphere as a superorganism can be much better articulated thanks to Living Systems Theory, a theory of the living that has been applied from cells and organs to society and supranational levels. The main proposition is that every living system has 20 critical subsystems (or functions) processing either matter–energy or information .

You must be free. You are responsible for the deliberate cultivation of genuine concern and love for other people. We are thus trying to be human on purpose, as if we felt it necessary to go around making great efforts to have heads.

Nirvāṇa is a psychological state of mind. It’s not a place, like heaven. It’s not something that’s not here; it is here, in the middle of the turmoil—what’s called saṃsāra, the whirlpool of life conditions. That nirvāṇa is what? It is the condition that comes when you are not compelled by desire, or by fear, or by social commitments—when you hold your center and act out of there.

A whole world of latent instincts is wakening in us—a ‘general’ soul which was only waiting for a body in order to disclose itself.

We must feel ourselves members of the whole Earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thought: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality. Similarly, man has no true reality apart from the Earth, nor has the Earth without mankind. It is an unreal concept when the modern scientific investigator thinks, according to his premises, that Earth-evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there.

I submit to you: this is the most complex moment in the most complex place in the universe to date.

Man’s achievement obviously is not in the organic lines; many animals are prettier, faster, stronger, an so forth. Man’s monopoly is just what we have tried to define—his symbolic activities and universes.

From an evolutionary perspective, crises are a sign that something has gone wrong. The patterns of the past are no longer working. Crises are thus a challenge: the challenge to adapt. They are the challenge to let go of the old ways of thinking and move on to a new way of seeing. Thus, humanity’s current crisis may not, at its root, be an economic crisis or an environmental crisis, it may well be a crisis of consciousness: a crisis in how we see ourselves and the world around.

You have to remember one of the famous stories of Sri Ramakrishna. There was a student who had been with him and had been learning that all things in the world are Brahman; are manifestations of the divine. And having heard this, he left the master’s ashram and went walking down the road. And there comes along an elephant swinging its trunk and looking rather fierce. And there is a mahout riding on the elephant, and he says to this man, “Hey, get out of the way! This is a fierce elephant.” But he thought, “I am Brahman. Elephant is Brahman. We are all one Godhead and no trouble can come.” So he didn’t get out. And as he approached, the elephant swatted him with his trunk and threw him into the bramble bushes at the side of the road, from which he eventually extracted himself bleeding and bruised. And he went back to the master and told what had happened. And the master shook his head and said to him, “But you should have realized that the mahout warning you was also Brahman.”

There is present on many levels in nature a tendency toward order, form, and symmetry; hence in living systems toward organic coordination; and in man toward personal coordination; this tendency being realized when circumstances are favorable.

If we want the Earth to function as a whole system, we really have to be very deliberative about what we select with the whole system in mind.