It is the goddess of this Earth. It is the biological mind. It is that all boundaries are illusions, and that life is a thinking, feeling entelechy of some sort. And we are just like a little droplet that has somehow escaped from the river of cognition, and now imagine that we’re the only water in the cosmos. Not so, it turns out.
We have defined nature as dead. You know, atoms screaming through empty space ruled by tensor equations of the third degree—that’s our picture of what nature is. That isn’t what it is. It’s a mind of some sort.
The ego is permitting us to slowly—not so slowly—commit suicide. And, you know, the fact that we cannot act collectively, that we are suspicious of all forms of collectivism—really, “all for one and one for all” is not our style. Instead, what we have going is a catfight.
We’re talking about the survival of life on the only planet that we are at certain that has life on it. This may be the site of a cosmic experiment with universal implications, and it rests in our hands.
Everybody here tonight is here because a whole bunch of people didn’t drop the ball. And you think you’ve got problems? Nine times in the last million years the ice has moved south from the poles, miles thick. No antibiotics, no electronic communication—nothin’! And I’m sure these people were miserable, and they dragged through it, and they lived, and they passed it on. Now we’re it. And we will be judged the lamest of the lame if we cannot come to terms with this and begin to talk about what is going on.
It is a mystery. It is not going to be reduced to the firing of synapses, or repressed sexual desires, or day residues, or anything like that. It is the very thing which all these religions are yammering about. It’s there. It’s real. I mean, if you think that the world is empty of adventure, then you just haven’t been hanging out with the right crowd.
We are in the birth canal right now of a planetary civilization. Literally, the amniotic oceans of five hundred years ago—that’s all gone. There is no frontier. There is no going back. The peace of the fetal environment is gone. And now, in transition, literally, the walls are closing in. You can’t breathe. You can’t eat. You can’t find your way. It appears to be the end. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is: that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the backside of your mind, you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people, spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven. God is some kind of lost continent in the human mind. And if we will but explore the human mind, we can reclaim these relationships with our own authenticity, and shed the childishness of historical existence and gender politics and all the rest of it, and move on to the real business of establishing a real civilization.
Capitalism is as anti-human a philosophy as you can possibly conceive. Because at this very moment we should be consuming less, manufacturing less, selling less, transporting less. And what’s the battle cry? Free trade everywhere! What does free trade mean? It means my right to come to your country and sell the most outlandish junk you’ve ever seen, and you will have no right to turn it away. Because in the name of free trade, crapola has to go everywhere.
Ordinary communication is achieved through small mouth noises. As primates, we have a throat and voice box arrangement that allows us to produce small mouth noises for hours if necessary—I’m the living proof of it. But it’s not a very efficient mode of communication, because what happens is: I have a thought. I look in a culturally sanctioned dictionary which I have copied into my head. I translate the thought into an acoustical signal using my mouth, which moves across space, which enters your ears. You rush to your interior dictionary, and you construct my meaning out of your dictionary. Now, notice that this process rests on a very shaky assumption. It rests on the assumption that your dictionary and my dictionary were published by the same folks in the same year. If your dictionary is different from mine, you will not correctly reconstruct my meaning, and we will have what we call misunderstanding.
If you want to think about virtual reality, this is a virtual reality. All this stuff—these fixtures, the architecture, the infrastructure, the road—these are ideas. It was an idea, and it has then been summoned into matter by the allotment of funds, the spending of money, the hiring of craftsmen, so forth and so on. Our whole civilization is an excreted set of interlocking ideas; agreements.
Novelty keeps building on novelty already achieved. It crosses biological lines, atomic lines, molecular lines. It is a law of the universe I’m proposing: that novelty is conserved. So then, what we represent is the kind of ultimate nexus of novelty. And I believe that we are being wound tighter and tighter and tighter into a confrontation with the equivalent of the singularity at the center of a black hole—but it isn’t a gravitational singularity that I’m talking about, it’s a novelty singularity. And so the universe is growing toward some kind of ultimate state of boundaryless hyperconnectivity. And when that is achieved, the process will cease to be describable in the locus of ordinary spacetime and energy.
The whole problem with the world is that we cannot feel the consequences of what we are doing.
You can call it ego, you can call it male dominance, you can call it the phonetic alphabet—whatever it is, it has to be stopped because the planet is imperiled by it. And my analysis of it is that the only way to do it is to dissolve the boundaries that culture and language and tradition have allowed us to create. And they are largely boundaries that suppress women—not because men hate women, but because men hate the feminine, and they want to control and hold it back. It’s threatening. It’s devouring. I mean, the fact that the French refer to orgasm as the “little death” tells you what a weird kind of ambivalence haunts our relationship to anything which dissolves us out of the knot that we have tied ourselves into.
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?
Good intentions are not sufficient. You have to locate where the threat is coming from and act accordingly. There are no points for good intentions in the game of evolution.
There’s some tendency in the New Age—which I don’t understand very well—that wants to make everything older than it is. You know, the pyramids are 50,000 years old, Atlantis, Rosenfell, 100,000 years old. The miracle is how new everything is. The pyramids were built day before yesterday. Charlemagne was king of France early this morning. It’s all very, very recent. I mean, the emergence of mind out of non-mind is an event practically on top of us.
I haven’t proposed anything weirder than the Big Bang, saying that a universe can condense itself faster and faster down into a super-novel object. Sounds to me like a considerably more conservative statement than to say that a universe can spring from nothing for no reason in a single instant.