The idea is not to confront bad ideas but to come up with good ideas. Otherwise, your enemies define the game and you are the loyal opposition.
If you are inside a Christian world, or a capitalist world, or a Jewish world, or a Republican world, or a Democratic world—these are worlds of ideas. These are ideas. We can live by ideas, but we can’t live by ideas alone. It creates megalomania. It creates unbalance. It creates a grotesque parody of what life is supposed to be about. And what life—I think—is supposed to be about is the reclamation of the primacy of direct experience. That means sex, and psychedelics, and dancing, and conversation, and good eating, and lots of exercise, and travel, and attention to what Wittgenstein called the “present at hand.”
We see the consequences of not-feeling all around us. The toxification of the Earth, the toleration of overpopulation—and the institutions that promote it—is all achieved through a deadening of feeling. If we could feel what we are doing—to the Earth, to the elderly, to the young, to racial and social minorities—if we could feel the agony of what we do, we would stop doing it.
We are called to care for the project of being. And that means an appreciation of the minute particulars, an appreciation and a recognition of difference, an appreciation and a recognition of our position in the cosmos—which is both insignificant and paradoxically grandiose at the same time.
You’re given (on average) sixty, seventy years, and (on average) 145 pounds of meat. This is what you’re dealt: the meat and the time. And then it’s up to you to sort this out and make of it what you will. And the entropic path—the downward path into blame, unhappiness, self-blocking, so forth and so on—that’s always there. You know? You can release yourself into the river of consequences and take no responsibility for who you are. But the higher-stakes game—the more interesting game—is to see the whole thing as an opportunity.
It is the absence of consciousness that is making our situation so very uncomfortable. People going for the fast buck, people elbowing their neighbor and their neighbor’s concerns out of the way; trampling over each other. Low-consciousness activity is the problem.
They never experienced that dimension of freedom. It’s like having an automobile, and you drive it around and it seems to work fine, but there’s this button on the dashboard and you never investigate to find out what it does; what it is. And there is in us this switch.
The historical enterprise is an effort to turn the human body inside out so that the soul becomes visible and the body becomes a process that you can command in the imagination. Do you understand what that would look like?
All technology is the effort to create, ultimately, the ultimate tool.
All a computer is (even the most sophisticated of computers), is an enormous set of switches. So here you have a machine with fifty million switches. Set the switches one way and it will predict the weather. Set the switches another way and it will give you a helluva chess game. Set the switches another way and it will balance your checkbook. The computer begins to look like the crudest approximation of the union of spirit and matter. And look at it! There it is: gallium-arsenide, silicon, gold, platinum. But what is flowing through it? Electrons. But these electrons flow according to the architectonic plans of thought. It’s thought that flows in the computer. Not its thought—our thought. We tell it what to think and it thinks it. And as the computer shrinks, and as the data storage increases, more and more spirit is being stored in less and less matter.
The computers of the future will be the size of double-locked capsules or smaller. They probably will be taken internally, and just insert themselves in your tissue, and grow gold fibers into your brain-systems and interact with you. Well, now, are we talking about a drug or a machine? The answer is that biology is very machine-like at the micro-physical level.
