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.
The biological process that we call life—with its marvelous proliferation of innumerable patterns and forms—is essentially playful. By that I mean that it doesn’t have a serious purpose beyond itself. It’s an artform like music and like dancing. And the point of these art forms is always their present unfolding; the elaboration of an intelligible design of steps and movements through time.
Although it might seem initially farfetched, the creation of a hivemind society has some plausibility. It is possible for humans to be highly rationally integrated with one another, sharing the same intentions, plans, and goals, and coordinating together to achieve them. Technology is facilitating more extensive forms of rational integration. Furthermore, with current technology, it may soon be possible for humans to be highly phenomenologically integrated. Would high degrees of both forms of integration be desirable?
Has technological power increased human happiness? Is a scientifically controlled society desirable?
We value a free democratic society not because it is free of control hierarchies—it has at least as many as a totalitarian society—but because the character of control is different.
Science itself, a field of activity par excellence of the neural mind, has fallen into the traps of the limbic brain and in some stubborn cases even into the traps of the reptilian brain by narrowing down to specific teachings and by claiming to represent knowledge exclusively and absolutely. There is no small irony in the fact that “objectivity”-claiming science originates in the most subjective aspect of evolution, namely, the self-reflexive mind.
The evolution of society will typically lead to more autonomy and a greater capacity to internally produce organization with a minimum of external input.
Control is not the same as compulsion. Control is only a limitation of freedom, not necessarily its elimination, and this limitation is not necessarily hurting the controlled entity. It may be life-saving, as in the case when somebody takes your hand and leads you out of a maze. Indeed, every kind of problem solving is a kind of control. To solve a problem usually means to pick up one true solution from a combinatorially huge number of possible false answers.
Feel. Feel what is going on. You will be amazed to discover that you can feel no future and no past, you can’t feel anyone separate from the feeling that feels the feeling. All that appears to be not there at all. There is just what, for want of a better word, we must call “this.” And when you feel that thoroughly and find out that there is no future—never was and never will be—your anxiety to survive begins to diminish. Why should you go on? What is the point of going on? Everybody feels that it is a great thing to continue to be. Oh? Is that so necessary? Because you’ll eventually die. Everyone now is as good as dead. Because that’s one thing that is certain: that we will die. So we feel this colossal necessity that we must go on through future time. And if we can’t do it ourselves, we’ll produce children, who will produce children, who will produce children, who will always have this frantic necessity to go on and get somewhere. And nobody has any idea where that somewhere is. Fantastic!
What writing allows is expansion of the database, because things are not dependent on the wetware of human memory to survive from generation to generation. Suddenly the mush of brain is replaced by the durability of wood and stone and clay, and these things then become the medium upon which the primary database of the culture is being carried forward.
The intense and singular states of awareness triggered by viewing the Earth from space provide a new context in which to explore awe-inspiring stimuli, their psychological effects, and individual differences in sensitivity to such potentially transformative experiences.
This activity of doing something for the sake of something else is in essence an intricate series of escapes, escapes from oneself, from what is.
If your practice is good, you may become proud of it. What you do is good, but something is added to it. Pride is extra. Right effort is to get rid of something extra.
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.
Heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.
Supreme goals in my understanding are characteristically human. They must include the realization of one’s mortality and go beyond death, becoming supra-personal and somehow relating one’s personality to eternity. The idea of Evolution on the cosmic scale also belongs to this category; it is, essentially, a religious idea.
A value system necessary for our complicated civilization has not yet evolved. The traditional ethical codes give rules for individual behavior, but none for those complicated social systems that have arise, where the dramatis personae are not human beings, but abstract entities acting as if they were individuals, by means of legal or political fiction. Operating the colossal social structures of our time—from businesses to national states to mankind as a whole—with the ethical concepts of a nomadic bronze-age society of three thousand years ago is like operating an atomic reactor with the technology of a bushman.
In the average church all you get is talk. There’s no meditation, no spiritual discipline. They tell God what to do interminably, as if he didn’t know. And then they tell the people what to do, as if they could or even wanted to. And then they sing religious nursery rhymes. And then, to cap it all, the Roman Catholic Church—which did at least have an unintelligible service; which was, you know, it was real mysterious and suggested vast magic going on—they went and put the thing into bad English. And they took away incense, and they took away—they became a bunch of Protestants, and the thing was just terrible! So now all these Catholics are at loose ends. As Clare Boothe Luce put it—not to be a pun—but she said, you know, “It’s no longer possible to practice contemplative prayer at mass.” Because you’re being advised, exhorted, edified all the time, and it becomes a bore. Think of God listening to all those prayers! I mean, talking about grieving the Holy Spirit! It’s just awful. People have no consideration for God at all!
And how many steps backward in the process of trying to define and honor the human spirit have occurred because of drugs like sugar, opium, tea, coffee? Look at the caffeine drugs: they’re the only drugs on Earth that modern industrialists recognize to the point that they write them into contracts with workers—the coffee break. This isn’t because they love workers, it’s because it makes workers work!
The modern technosphere is the largest object in time in the universe that we know about.
Understanding, discovery, invention… From the first awakening of its reflective consciousness, humanity has been possessed by the demon of discovery; but until a very recent epoch this profound need remained latent, diffused and unorganized in the human mass. In every past generation true seekers, those by vocation or profession, are to be found; but in the past they were no more than a handful of individuals, generally isolated, and of a type that was virtually abnormal—the “inquisitive.” Today, without our having noticed it, the situation is entirely changed. In fields embracing every aspect of physical matter, life, and thought, the research-workers are to be numbered in hundreds of thousands, and they no longer work in isolation but in teams endowed with penetrative powers that it seems nothing can withstand.
The choice that’s coming up for us is fundamental. It is: are we to become the caregivers, the nurturers, and the gardeners of the Earth? Or is the Earth—I put it this way to somebody the other night. The question was: is the Earth our mother—therefore to be cared for into her old age, nurtured, revered, and loved? Or is the Earth our placenta—therefore to be examined for signs of toxin and then buried under the apple tree? In other words, what is the true nature of human beings? Are we to be integrated into nature, to celebrate it? Or is nature a demonic and titanic force that is imprisoning spirit and holding it back from its full unfolding in worlds of alien light and higher dimension so far from here that it’s a miracle that even rumor reached us of the possibility of salvation?
We know the proverb that “genius is to madness close allied.” And how do we know whether a certain modification in the structure of the whole sensory perceptive system is a sickness, or whether it is the growing edge, some kind of new improvement, of the human being? Well, we have certain very, very rough standards which we apply to this. But we can never be quite sure, because what we call sanity is mob rule. Sanity is simply the vote of organisms that recognize themselves to be human, and they get together and say, “Well, the way we see it is the way it is.”
I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it’s as if two people are reading each other’s minds.
