The microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. What this is really saying is that, at the level of a planet, you get a certain level of organization and spectrum of peripheral effects. The same thing—such as self-reflection, self-regulation, intent, goal-projection, steering toward perceived goals—you get the same kind of thing on the level of a society (can be a beehive or a herd of antelope or whatever), and you get it in the human individual and the human society. So really, what is to be seen is that we are the cutting edge of becoming. We are not a thing apart. We are a unique level of a multi-leveled organism.
If you were an extraterrestrial in a starship in orbit around this planet, what you would see, looking down, is a gene swarm. The species that seem to us to be animal forms extremely stable in time are actually highly permeable membranes over millennia and tens of millennia, with genes crossing over, moving around, and being basically obedient to the expression of some kind of teleological form. And it was the concern of nineteenth-century biology to eliminate teleology, to eliminate purpose and directedness. But it’s very hard to avoid the impression of some kind of attractor ahead of this planet, embedded in its history, and somehow channeling everything toward it. So that the progressive acceleration of human society—of information production, of communication, the proliferation of languages, natural and synthetic—all of these things are not something going on in the human domain and somehow sealed from the general state of nature, but are, in fact, part of the general state of nature. And the human experience, or the human animal—as the carrier of this catalytic process, this speeding up and accelerating of process on the surface of the planet—is not sealed from nature, but the leading edge; the leading edge of a process on this planet.
If we’re going to have a singularity, isn’t it more likely that it will emerge out of a situation of vast complexity than a situation of utter metaphysical nothingness? I think so. So I think that what the transcendental object is, is: it is the cause of the universe, if you will—except that this cause is at what we would conventionally refer to as the end. It’s what everything flows toward. It isn’t something wound up which runs down, it’s something diffuse which is gathered into something.
I imagine that passage through the transcendental object leads into the imagination, and that the imagination is really our true home, and that all of this electronics and culture and art and drugs and magic and ritual is about the prodigal return to the imagination as a cultural norm. And the transcendental object represents the narrow neck, the narrowest place, the place where the phase transition occurs—at least that’s what I hope.
What is ahead of us is true high adventure. The essence of it is its unknowability. Its promise is transformation. Its theater of occurrence is the here and now. We are not waiting for it to begin, it has already happened for us, and our job is to understand how that can be so.