Each grain of thought, now taken to the extreme limit of its individual consciousness, will simply be the incommunicable, partial, elementary expression of a total consciousness which is common to the whole earth, and specific to the earth: a spirit of the earth.

The assumption is generally that the complexification of the Internet and the free-standing machines of certain types is eventually going to lead to the outbreak of either consciousness or pseudo-consciousness of some sort in these large-scale systems.

People say, “Oh well, the law will take care of it”—the law won’t take care of it. You have to take care of it. And you can only be a law-abiding citizen by trusting your fellow men. And if you don’t do that, no one will trust you. And therefore, a system of mutual mistrust will exist, which of its very nature must fall apart. It cannot operate.

Social media have taken on the shape of a sort of ‘peer review system’ of private life.

There is, as yet, no really serious program at the government level to do anything radical about the pollution of water, the waste of water, the pollution of air, and the general ravaging of the United States of America. I’m amazed that congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.

Most of the info we use to inform ourselves is indirect knowledge: knowledge accumulated by others that we import into our minds and adopt as our own. Every statistic you come across, everything you read in a textbook, everything you learn from parents or teachers, everything you see or read in the news or on social media, every tenet of conventional wisdom—it’s all indirect knowledge.

The Global Brain can be defined as the self-organizing, adaptive network formed by all people on this planet together with the information and communication technologies that connect them into a cohesive system. The idea is that global interactions have made the people on this planet interdependent to such a degree that together they form a single superorganism, i.e. an organism (global society) whose components are organisms themselves (individual people). As the Internet becomes faster, smarter, and more encompassing, it increasingly interconnects people and computers into a single information-processing network, which plays the role of a nervous system for this superorganism.

Just as the spider emits the thread (of the web) out of itself and again withdraws it into itself, likewise the mind projects the world out of itself and again resolves it into itself.

Thought has not understood the very nature of illusion and the creator of illusions.

It’s really a matter of semantics as to what is self and what is other within you. It depends where you draw the line.

You’re in the middle of dinner, and you’re wondering about what you’ll have for dessert. During dessert you’re already anticipating coffee. After coffee, while you’re in the dessert, you’re not only thinking about the coffee, but what you’ll do afterwards. “And then we’ll go bowling? And then maybe a movie? How about an ice cream soda? A ride? Home. Music? Let’s make love. What’s in the refrigerator?” And on and on it goes, rush after rush. Because between every rush in which you are lost in the rush—and you have lost your self-consciousness into the experience, and you are back in the source—between every one of those rushes is that little panic of separation, and there’s the seeking of the next rush.

There is nothing in the universe except spirit, in different states or degrees of organization and plurality.

When everyone recognizes beauty as beautiful, then there is ugliness. When everyone recognizes goodness as good, then there is evil. Thus being and non-being arise mutually. Easy and difficult are mutually implied. Short and long are mutually contrasted. High and low are mutually posited.

Feeling threatened by the inevitability of death is really the same experience as feeling alive, and that as all beings are feeling this everywhere, they are all just as much “I” as myself. Yet the “I” feeling, to be felt at all, must always be a sensation relative to the “other,” to something beyond its control and experience.

The infinite being which unites in one stream of creation my mind and the outer world.

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

The truth can take care of itself. It does not require your belief. The truth need not be treated as fragile. You can beat on the truth with ball-peen hammers and it will do just fine, thank you. So one should be respectful in the presence of truth, but not cowed or awed or something like that. The truth wants to be appreciated, it wants to be known. It can take care of itself. Belief is toxic—all belief. Don’t believe in anything. Live in the presence of the felt fact of immediate experience. Everything beyond that is conjecture. In contemporary society we’re always in the past and in the future. But what is real are feelings. And feeling attain a nexus only in the moment. Only in the moment. So explore the edges, keep your logical razors sharp, trust nothing that you haven’t verified for yourself, and my faith is that the universe will take you in and share with you its meaning and its intent and its conclusion.

“Yourself.” Does this word, “yourself,” refer to your total organism? Does it refer to some sort of psychic entity which inhabits your organs? And if the former, then if you are your whole organism, you cannot neglect the principle that you are what you eat. And that, for example, if you don’t have the right kinds of vitamins and the right kinds of minerals, you’re not going to be healthy. If, on the other hand, your spiritual sanity—let’s call it that—really doesn’t depend on the state of your body (because, after all, we know many people with extremely sick bodies who are nevertheless absolutely marvelous as individuals), then it would suggest that the functioning of the psyche is fundamentally different and independent from the functioning of the physical organism. But, on the other hand, we know all sorts of people who are quite plainly neurotic or even psychotic, but who are also geniuses and very creative. So if you can function well with a sick body, if you can function well with a sick psyche, who are you? What are you?

I referred to the unparalleled complexity of the human group—all those races, those nations, those states whose entanglements defy the resourcefulness of anatomists and ethnologists alike. There are so many rays in that spectrum that we despair of analysing them. Let us try instead to perceive what this multiplicity represents when viewed as a whole. If we do this we will see that its disturbing aggregation is nothing but a multitude of sequins all sending back to each other by reflection the same light. We find hundreds or thousands of facets, each expressing at a different angle a reality which seeks itself among a world of groping forms. We are not astonished (because it happens to us) to see in each person around us the spark of reflection developing year by year. We are all conscious, too, at all events vaguely, that something in our atmosphere is changing with the course of history.

By virtue of individual and collective human reflection, evolution—overflowing the physico-chemical organisation of bodies—turns back upon itself and thereby reinforces itself with a new organising power vastly concentric to the first—the cognitive organisation of the universe. To think ‘the world’ (as physics is beginning to realise) is not merely to register it but to cofer upon it a form of unity it would otherwise (i.e. without being thought) be without.

We exist in our physical environment. And just as, when you watch the behavior of water you can see pulses in it, you can see forms in it, you can see patterns in it, so, in a very similar way, we are patterns of the universal energy. And just as a whirlpool is a constant pattern in water, but no water stays put in it, so in much the same way we are a constant pattern of physical energy in which nothing stays put. In the same way that a given golf club is “So-and-So Country Club” and remains such for years, but all the membership changes, all the buildings change, so we do. Because what the club consists in is a pattern of behavior. And so, too, we are patterns of behavior. But we are indissolubly connected with the entire universe, and when we die you might simply say the universe has stopped waving in this particular way that we called John Doe.

The universe coheres by everything depending on everything else. And therefore, nothing exists alone, nothing exists in its own right.

By age 8, most of us—if we have the time on our hands—are able to carry out an analysis of being where we reach the conclusion that everything is events in the nervous system. You know? I mean, we understand this. We understand that light being reflected from objects then creates neurochemical events which reconstruct an image of the outer world. So we pay lip service to this idea that everything is a neurological event, but in fact we have a very strong faith in the so-called three-dimensional Newtonian world. And yet this is the faith that can be deconstructed on psychedelics.

These people who expand the notion of autopoiesis to a larger system than just you and me, they said Gaia is an autopoietic system. Because it fulfills all the conditions: it fulfills the condition that all the components of that Gaia system are productively interactive with each other—and what do they produce? The very components with which they start out. So Gaia is a perpetually reconstructing, regenerating system which maintains the system as it is at the moment; the Gaia system. How can it do that? Because the sun is pumping in enough energy that this circularity of the processes which maintain the living organization of Gaia is maintained. Otherwise, it collapses and the whole thing goes.