Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), a scientist and Jesuit priest, made an observation about humankind that departed from both Christian doctrine and the scientific wisdom of his day: In some respects we are just another species, a member of the Great Ape family, but in other respects we are a new evolutionary process. That makes the origin of our species as significant, in its own way, as the origin of life.

In everyday life one used to speak of man as an individual, living and moving freely about our planet, freely building up his history. Until recently the historians and the students of the humanities, and to a certain extent even the biologists, consciously failed to reckon with the natural laws of the biosphere, the only terrestrial envelope where life can exist. Basically man cannot be separated from it; it is only now that this indissolubility begins to appear clearly and in precise terms before us. He is geologically connected with its material and energetic structure. Actually no living organism exists on earth in a state of freedom. All organisms are connected indissolubly and uninterruptedly, first of all through nutrition and respiration, with the circumambient material and energetic medium. Outside it they cannot exist in a natural condition.

Humans have long been more like bees or ants than we might think, since we have already built hives of culture where no individual has a good picture of the final result aimed at by the whole, and the drive for progress is slowly making our endeavors ever more like hives through advances in information communication technology.

When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there, you’re looking at you.

If you ask me to show you God, I will point to the sun, or a tree, or a worm. But if you say, “You mean, then, that God is the sun, the tree, the worm, and all other things?”—I shall have to say that you have missed the point entirely.

For heaven’s sake, nobody is suggesting that LSD is a cure for alcoholism. That, to me, is absurd. It’s not a cure for alcoholism, it’s a cure for stupidity! And a person (who is killing themselves by drinking themselves to death) takes 500 mics of LSD and says, “What a stupid person I am! I’m killing myself!” And so then they look at their behavior and they cease that behavior. And this is what has to be done on a societal scale. And it is not as difficult as we may wish to be assured by the establishment.

There is no magic ceiling on the intelligence of machines. We are going to make machines more intelligent than we are. In many ways, in many areas, they already are more intelligent than we are. And what it will mean when suddenly the system awakens to itself is not clear. I mean, this may be cheap science fiction, or it may be precisely how the end of the world will occur. This thing is being born. How it will view us—I don’t know.

A mind that aspires to immortality, whether it traces its beginnings to a mortal human being or is a completely artificial creation, must be prepared to adapt constantly from the inside.

Neither the physicist’s description, nor that of the physiologist, contains any trait of the sensation of sound. Any description of this kind is bound to end with a sentence like: those nerve impulses are conducted to a certain portion of the brain, where they are registered as a sequence of sounds. We can follow the pressure changes in the air as they produce vibrations of the ear-drum, we can see how its motion is transferred by a chain of tiny bones to another membrane and eventually to parts of the membrane inside the cochlea, composed of fibres of varying length, described above. We may reach an understanding of how such a vibrating fibre sets up an electrical and chemical process of conduction in the nervous fibre with which it is in touch. We may follow this conduction to the cerebral cortex and we may even obtain some objective knowledge of some of the things that happen there. But nowhere shall we hit on this ‘registering as sound,’ which simply is not contained in our scientific picture, but is only in the mind of the person whose ear and brain we are speaking of.

The ability of the human being to have these sensory responses—to hear sounds, to see lights, and to know about galaxies and stars—the ability, the brain which makes that possible, is in itself a member of the external world. The brain is a member of the same world it’s looking at. It has something in common with the universe that surrounds it.

I think this view of the superorganism is telling us that we should expand our horizon of consciousness from the individual human to the level of humanity as a whole.

Where do you look for models? Where do you go? The answer is so obvious. You go to nature. Nature has been playing this game for three billion years on this planet. We have been playing the game—we, the apostles of Christian scientism—for about 2,000 years. Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style that, if we could but emulate it, we could rise out of the rubble that we are making of the planet.

You and I are a pattern integrity sliding along on all these strands that came from all around the universe, coming momentarily together, and then they all come apart again and leave us, and they go out as that 1,000 tons of that process and become part of other organisms and so forth, part of the scenery, and joining up with other trees, whatever it might be. So I see that I was never anything but a beautiful design pattern integrity, and that I had been employing this equipment for my information-sensing under the particular biological conditions of this particular planet.

I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet—which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature herself.

Culture is an operating system—that’s all it is—and the operating system can be wiped out and replaced by something else.

Even under the spur of immediate fear or desire, without the taste for life, mankind would soon stop inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed in advance. And, stricken at the very source of the impetus which sustains it, it would disintegrate from nausea or revolt and crumble into dust.

Can we understand the spacetime nature of the planet well enough (since it’s so complex) to even be sensitive to it and cooperate with it? I mean, if we can’t even understand what we’re seeing when we look at the planet, then there’s not much we can do to cooperate.

Children with the freshness of their senses come directly to the intimacy of this world. This is the first great gift they have.

Various developments in brain-to-brain communication could enable phenomenological unity, including the possible creation of an ‘exocortex.’ This would be a prosthetic extension of the brain that can integrate smoothly and seamlessly between two or more brains at the same time, enabling them to function as parts of a single whole.

The human organism harbors a set of mental and bodily faculties that are intentionally employed for the realization of intentions. These faculties include limbs, controllable muscles, sense organs, those mental faculties that are under conscious control, and any human faculty that can be controlled by the central nervous system. These faculties constitute one’s inalienable set of means that can be employed to realize intentions formed by the will.

Inextricably, we belong in the world.

All of nature has halted its activity to turn and watch as Homo sapiens sapiens, the double-thinking monkey, takes the stage and begins to work with novelty on a scale like nothing that has ever been seen before. And this tool-building function—and I use the word “tool” in the broadest possible sense: language is a tool, social organization is a tool—that this is what we do. We build tools. And McLuhan very wisely observed: these tools are extensions of who we are. They are only distinct from us in our opinion, but in fact they represent extensions of our humanness.

Life is not an ephemeral process in an entropic universe. Life is a process that has a duration that exceeds that of star-life.

How are we going to save this planet? How are we going to take the lethal cascade of toxic technological and ignorance-producing habits that are loose on this planet and channel them toward some kind of a sane and livable world? Well, the answer is emerging in culture out of the collectivity of global consciousness. It is what I call the archaic revival. It is this very large turnover in the mass mind; some people call it a paradigm shift. It’s an effort to recover the sensory ratios, the feelings, and the attitudes of 15,000 to 20,000 years ago—before fear, before ego, before male dominance, before hierarchy, hoarding, warfare, propaganda, child abuse, all of these things. And the answer lies—as was indicated last night—in integration into the dynamics of nature.