Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else? Plant your peas and your corn in the field when the moon is full, or risk failure. This has been understood since planting began. The attention of the seed to the draw of the moon is, I suppose, measurable, like the tilt of the planet. Or, maybe not—maybe you have to add some immeasurable ingredient made of the hour, the singular field, the hand of the sower.

Life has been urbanizing itself from its inception. The first organic molecule was the first urbanization, that is to say, the appearance of the first bond of cooperation-information-knowledge-response-interdependence capable of transcending the deterministic dogmas of mass-energy. Eventually such bond will blossom in that which we call love. Therefore true urbanization is a love bondage. Arcology, that is, architecture as human ecology, is one of the many stages of such urbanization.

The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense (largely justified) that change is imposed on him, whereas the nineteenth-century frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his own choice.

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.

Go into the hidden dimension and return with numinous, culture-constellating material.

How many people on planet Earth does it take to connect through the Internet to co-create? We don’t know. But I think we have enough people already. I believe there are enough innovations and creative solutions—at least in part—to start solving every single problem we have on Earth. I think Buckminster Fuller was right.

We learned to center our identity, our selfhood, in the controlling part—the mind—and increasingly to disown as a mere vehicle the part controlled. It thus escaped our attention that the organism as a whole, largely unconscious, was using consciousness and reason to inform and control itself. We thought of our conscious intelligence as descending from a higher realm to take possession of a physical vehicle. We therefore failed to see it as an operation of the same formative process as the structure of nerves, muscles, veins, and bones—a structure so subtly ordered (that is, intelligent) that conscious thought is as yet far from being able to describe it.

We’re all in this great stream of change which we call life. We are the stream. If you imagine you’re separate from it and you’re being carried along by it as if you were a cork, that’s a delusion. You’re a wave of the stream itself. So get with it!

I’m deeply embedded in beautiful, bountiful, brilliant collaborative human superintelligence on many scales.

The end envisaged is a form of consciousness entirely free from the partiality of individual ego-consciousness.

Part of what is wrong with our society (and hence with ourselves) is that we consume images. We don’t produce them. We need to produce, not consume media. Media is a huge issue. You can’t escape it. So what are you going to do about it? The only solution is to drive it, to take charge. Otherwise you will be poisoned by it. And as more and more people are waking up to this, essentially we are seeing, I think, a huge artistic revolution: a revolution in values that reaches into science, that reaches into politics, that reaches into every aspect of life, but that is coming from the imagination thoroughly stimulated and activated by the discovery of all these natural and synthetic substances which perturb the mind. And I’m not denying that a certain amount of social chaos goes along with this. But, on the other hand, I can point to pretty psychedelically pure centuries—like the thirteenth in Europe—and there was still plenty of social chaos going on. I don’t think you can lay social chaos at the feet of psychedelics, I think social chaos is an inimical part of the system. What psychedelics do is: they give a direction to that chaos, a dimension of vertical ascent. Because inevitably, out of the psychedelic situation emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism. That’s the inevitable product of any psychedelically-driven social process. How well that idealistic idea then brokers its way to the throne, if it does, is another issue.

The mental forces now largely and regrettably scattered and immobilized in the universities, the learned societies, research institutions, and technical workers of the world could be drawn together in a real directive world intelligence.

The clock is ticking. This is not a test. There will not be a re-try, you know? This is the window of opportunity between the unknown and eternity. If not taken, then the entire enterprise could be lost. The whole thing, from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Whitney Houston—it could all go down the drain if we don’t act to preserve it through an act of human cognition plus courage.

If we are a republic where all men are equal, everybody—every single citizen of the United States, however well or not well educated—has a right to the access to all information. That’s supposedly what we believe in. That is another way of saying—listen to this!—that is simply another way of saying that you are all God.

The intelligent mind is always striving out in all possible directions, and as soon as a new direction becomes apparent—be it computers, civilization or the global brain—the intelligent mind will seek it out.

Your apparent disconnection—the fact that you are not tied to other people with umbilical cords, or some kind of wiring that gives you one mind—nevertheless, we do have one mind.

Tat tvam asi is the Hindu formula, meaning, “That (Brahman or God) art thou.” This is also the theme of several forms of Western mysticism; in the words of Eckhart, “While I am here, He is in me; after this life, I am in Him. All things are therefore possible to me, if I am united to Him Who can do all things.” But for the modern Westerner there is a danger in this knowledge; reading and practicing such ideas he is apt to make a God of his ego rather than an ego of his God.

When you get self-conscious and you watch everything you do because you’re anxious about making a mistake, you find: in that you’re all tied up and you can’t act. So, in exactly the same way, a community of people which is always watching itself through its agents, so that—you know, in a Nazi state there are not only the ordinary policemen on the beat, but there’s a block captain for every area, and there’s some kind of a sneak or traitor who’s going to inform the authorities… everywhere, you see; hidden—so this community is watching itself all the time because it’s a community that doesn’t trust itself. And a community which constantly watches itself is like a person who’s always watching himself and holding a club over his head to go CLUNK the minute he might be in danger of doing something wrong.

Is this, perhaps, an inner view of the organizing process which, when the eyes are open, makes sense of the world even at points where it appears to be supremely messy?

What everybody wants is something to happen on its own. And everybody wants that.

The more we move from indirect and unidirectional towards direct and multidirectional tools, the more muddled our sense of identity, agency, and responsibility seems to become.

What about the Internet? Is it the coming of the superorganism? It is prosthesis on an incredible scale. It is going to redefine what it is to be human. I think technologies are neither gods nor demons, it’s what you do with it. But the dilemma of human freedom is that we don’t know where we rest in the universal hierarchy of good and evil.

The necessary condition for forming systems leading to useful results is not from the systemic point of view that nervous organization should reproduce the organization of the environment as some sort of representation or model. The only essential is that a system may be formed in which elements belonging both to the body and to the environment are fitted together. The structure of the body, of course, “reflects” the structure of the environment in the sense that by inspection of the bodily structure we may also conclude something about the possible structure of the environment. When looking at the body of an organism we may speculate on what kind of environment would be appropriate. The study of the organism is simultaneously the study of the environment.

The laboratory of being is your own body, your experience. Everything else is going to come as an unconfirmable rumor so fraught around with epistemological problems that you might as well toss it out at the beginning and not even bother with it. The basic thing is the empowerment of experience. That’s why sexuality has always raised such a ruckus among authority freaks. It’s why the psychedelic is so unsettling. It’s why youth itself is unsettling, because these things cause symmetry breaks: they cause a shift in perspective. But this is, in fact, at this point in time, exactly what we have to have.