When we experience the world simply as a happening, we’re apt to say, “Well, hell, who’s in charge around here?” Because we always think somebody has to be in charge. I mean, doesn’t somebody have to be in charge to make things go the right way, or to make anything happen at all? I mean, don’t you need a bit of a shove? Mustn’t there be some primordial source of energy to goose the whole thing into being? No, there doesn’t. All that is a military image of nature where somebody’s in command.

I² means “intelligence looking at intelligence.” That’s how intelligence increases: when intelligence looks at intelligence and criticizes intelligence.

History is a tremendous state of temporary disequilibrium. History lasts 15,000 years. It’s a dash from munching mushrooms around the campfire to walking up the beryllium ramp into the starship. And it’s just like… that! One moment you’re in Africa, scrabbling for grubs under cow pies, and the next moment you’re setting a course for Alpha Sagittarius with a fleet behind you that represents the population of the planet. There was just a moment, a hesitation, a kind of defocusing and refocusing, and then we find ourselves there. Unfortunately, we—microbial creatures of such brevity—for us, we experience it as an unending eternity: the fall into history, the hellish march toward self-reclamation and self-recognition. But in the life of the planet it’s literally no more than a blink, and where there stood monkeys, there now stand the collective cybernauts of hyperspace.

We are all gathered here at the endgame of developmental processes on this planet. We are about to become unrecognizable to ourselves as a species. Our technologies, our religions, our science has pushed us toward this for thousands of years without us awakening to what the denouement would be. Now we stand close enough to it, and I think all but the most lumpen among us must feel the tug of the transcendental and the transformative.

If science is correct in determining the earth to be composed of the same stuff which makes up the cosmos, and if life is the technology through which such stuff becomes animated, then life, which now appears to be the exception to the rule within the physical cosmos, could eventually become the rule. If, in addition to being feasible, this potential animation of the cosmos is also desirable, then the responsibility of life lies in the transfiguration of an immensely powerful physical phenomenon into an immensely loving spiritual one. An eschatological imperative. The esthetogenesis of the universe.

[Roland Fischer] views life on Earth as “a single event, exponentially receding and proceeding in time.” This unity of life is symbolized by an exponential (logarithmic) spiral of time on which are ordered “adaptive events of increasingly efficient utilization of energy as well as increasingly rapid time rate of change.”

A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.

That’s exactly what you would do if you had the privilege of dreaming any dream you wanted when you went to bed at night. This would enable you, of course, in one night, to dream 75 years of clock time. And what you would do, first of all: you would have marvelous adventures. You would have every conceivable delight and satisfy every wish. And then, as time went on, that would get a little boring and you would get more daring. You would have adventures: you would rescue princesses from dragons. And then you would get even more daring, and you would dream that you weren’t dreaming. And then you’d get into really serious messes—because wouldn’t it be a surprise when you woke up! And eventually you would be dreaming that you were sitting here in this auditorium listening to me. You would eventually get around to that, for your sins.

Either humanity is a fact without precedent or measure; in which case it does not fit into our natural categories, and our science is valueless. Or it represents a new turn in the mounting spiral of things; and in this case we can see no other turn to correspond with it lower down except the very first organization of matter. Nothing can be compared with the coming of reflective consciousness except the appearance of consciousness itself.

We are one species. We are star stuff, harvesting starlight.

One should not be ashamed of wishful thinking for this is just what all inventive and creative people do. They are dreamers, and they find ways of realizing their dreams because they wish and dream effectively. That is to say, their wishful thinking is not vague; their desires are imagined so precisely and specifically that they can very often be carried out.

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequences of a misfortune, or you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

Abstraction is the knife poised at our hearts. We are so much the victims of abstraction that, with the Earth in flames, we can barley rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. That’s the level of disempassioning that abstraction has laid upon us.

New technologies can be understood by analyzing how they help realize human intentions by extending and building on the existing inventory of human means, including human faculties (at their current state of development) and other extensions already present.

This incremental development, I think, will roughly parallel the evolution of various characteristics in invertebrates in our own lineage. So by maybe as soon as 2010, these utility robots evolve into something that has a broad enough set of uses.

We have to realize that the external universe is just as much ourself as our own body.

These minor loops, the maintenance and continuity crowds with their fantastic machines (us, most of the time), are forced to transcend themselves by transforming routine into ritual through grace and reverence. These rituals are offerings, if one chooses, to the existential, immanent, fragmentary, helpless Omega God; ritual offerings otherwise expressed as the reverence for life.

Artifacts enhance the functional powers of the organ that they extend, not by independently performing a function that resembles the organ’s function, but by cooperating with the organ in a way that enhances its activities, in this way engaging in a symbiotic relationship with the organ. For example, a telescope extends visual perception, not by engaging in perceptual tasks independently from the eye (as for example infra-red detectors do) but by teaming up with the eye, thus forming a functional unit consisting of telescope plus eye, that is more powerful than the eye alone. When a telescope is used, inception of visual perception no longer takes place when light rays hit the eye, but when light rays hit the front lens of the telescope.

This planet, this solar system, this galaxy is people-ing in exactly the same way that an apple tree apples.

That we must proceed slowly and critically in this attempt to construct an “anatomy” of society is evident.

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.

The individual feels restricted to the area of his voluntary behavior, since all else seems to be an independent and uncontrollable happening on the part of something quite other than himself. He does not realize that, just as one cannot walk without ground, one cannot experience doing except in relation to happening, or self (center) except in relation to other (surround).

If we try to fit our contemporary history into the general pattern of the human past (by applying the same method that has served us for fitting the human past into the general evolution of the Earth) we must conclude that we are standing, at the present moment, not only at a change of century and civilization, but at a change of epoch.

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.