We, as members of Western culture in the twentieth century, inherit a way of playing this game wherein we pretend that we are—each one of us—an isolated individual who comes into the world as a stranger. We do not know, in the ordinary course of events, that that is not true and that each one of us is a way in which the whole fullness of ultimate reality pretends that it gets lost in an individual life situation, and endures the adventures of pain and death, and endures all the critical efforts and decisions connected with practical and moral problems.

The whole phenomenon of the automatic stratification of a cosmos in a state of cosmogenesis!

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.

True humility is the gate through which vicariousness itself becomes fused into the act of creation, since the humble person fuses himself back into the whole living creature. The humble and the meek are, thus, of the Kingdom of God, not at a certain future time but at the self-creating “now” of the theoecological immanence.

I have been years seeking the ideal place, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I can possibly find it is to be it.

I have argued that we may soon see a dynamic play of cultural pluralism unfolding on the substrate of a more uniform social fabric, thus reversing the traditional control hierarchy. “Life-style laboratories” such as Berkeley, California, or Boulder, Colorado, seem to herald such an enhanced balance among the levels of evolutionary self-attunement. With it, the semiautonomous thrust of technological change may gradually subside and a greater flexibility become introduced at all levels simultaneously. Of course, such a multilevel process can then no longer be controlled in the same strict cybernetic terms—it has simply to be lived.

What we call things, facts, or events are after all no more than convenient units of perception, recognizable pegs for names, selected from the infinite multitude of lines and surfaces, colors and textures, spaces and densities which surround us.

If a global Web mind comes about, it will clearly link humans together in a new way, leading to some kind of different and more intelligently structured social order.

The Earth is one whole, man himself being one of the active factors in the Earth’s evolution.

We are thinking together about the whole question of psychological evolution. Because man, throughout the millennia, has been accustomed—is used, conditioned—to think that he will evolve. “I am this today. Give me time to change. I am envious, frightened, burdened with enormous sorrow, and I must have time to get over it, to go beyond it.” This is what we are used to. So the speaker is saying whether such psychological evolution exists at all. Or: it is the invention of thought because it says, “I cannot change today, give me time. For god’s sake, tomorrow.” The everlasting becoming.

Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.

A sufficiently complex stochastic process will give a satisfactory representation of a discrete source.

When Man’s preoccupation with the means of livelihood became less insistent he had the leisure to come to the mystery of his own self.

The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established order. The Universe refuses the deadening influence of complete conformity. And yet in its refusal, it passes towards novel order as a primary requisite for important experience.

As the fruit implies the tree, the human organism implies a cosmic energy system which “peoples” in the same way as a plant flowers.

Now that modern man has been sharply brought back to a sense of reality by the sudden pressure around him of the forces of totalization, he must reject as an illusion the idea that he can reach the peak of his own fundamental being in isolation, egoistically, ‘individualistically.’ No: there is no end waiting for each one of us, within a universe undergoing the involution that engenders spirit, other than the end of mankind itself. There is no way out, therefore, open to our individual drive towards survival and super-life, other than resolutely to plunge back into the general current from which we thought, for a moment, we could escape.

Find out for yourself what happens if you do not think in terms of the future.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

In every respect, everything that the Buddha ever suggested that his followers should do was by nature of an experiment. Buddhism never uttered its final teaching; what it was actually after. All it describes are various experiments you can make to get on the road to it.

You know very well that after you die, and after everybody else that you’ve ever known about died, babies of all kinds—both human, animal, and vegetable—were born. And each one of them feels that it’s “I” in just exactly the same way that you do; feels that it’s the center of the universe. And therefore, every one of them is you. Only, this situation can only be experienced one at a time. So, you see: you will die and then someone else will be born. But it will feel like you—you, now. It will be, in other words, “I.” There is only one “I.” But it’s infinitely varied.

The problem is to explain how the behaviors that people associate with goodness, which typically benefit others and society as a whole, can evolve by a Darwinian process.

We must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal.

You’re surrounded by air and water and so on, and if you were not surrounded in that way it wouldn’t last very long. Also, you’re surrounded by people who feed you and keep you alive, and also give communications, which keep your mind going. Any person, totally isolated, would never even be human, right?

What he’s saying in The Phenomenon of Man is that we are now generating what he calls the noösphere. And the noösphere is the atmosphere of technical accretions and electronic information-transfer and electromagnetic fields—VHF, UHF, so forth and so on—and that this is part of evolution. His great insight was to see geology, biology, and sociology as a continuous spectrum.