Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system’s processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it. Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.

The big bang is the birth of space, a convulsion that could also be the origin of the cosmos if not of reality itself. The big bang birth is the ongoing event that we earthlings measure in fourteen or so eons, evidently according to our way of measuring. We have no way of seeing the big bang in its early youth or in its old age. Being more, far more, acquainted with reality could allow us a way to measure the entropy drift and have some approximation of a possible (probable?) end of the big bang, its self-generation and self-creation, the unstoppable metamorphosis of itself, space in action.

You’ve played a part in a changing concept of man and what life is all about. A relationship that you have assumed all these years—and not just you, but man, humanity, the whole of history has assumed: that relationship to a planet which is now changed.

Tools give the capacity to do certain things better, to achieve certain goals better. And insofar as they do, the humans that use them win at things, and as a result everybody has to use them or they kind of lose. So, one: the tools become obligate.

When intelligent machines are constructed, we should not be surprised to find them as confused and as stubborn as men on their convictions about mind-matter, consciousness, free will and the like. For all such questions are pointed at explaining the complicated interactions between parts of the self-model.

The sense of an organic interrelation based not merely on our more or less accidental coexistence on the surface of the Earth, or even on our common origin, but on the fact that we represent, all of us together, the front line, the crest of an evolutionary wave still in full flood.

I am aware when anger arises. I can see the whole movement of it—or greed, violence, and so on. Why is it not possible for thought itself to be aware as it arises? If it is possible in one direction, why not thought itself?

Vast knowledge of the mysteries of the universe increases pride, and to lay bare all mysteries is to be in danger of becoming bored.

I have no self except everything which is happening, and it sees itself from all the different standpoints called sentient beings.

It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make, since it will lead to an “intelligence explosion.” This will transform society in an unimaginable way.

The best thing to do is to relax and enjoy the tininess of us and the enormity of the rest of the universe. Of course, if you’re feeling depressed by that, you can always look at it the other way and think of how big you are compared to the atoms and the parts of atoms, and then you’re an enormous universe to those atoms. So you can sort of stand in the middle and enjoy everything both ways.

The early universe was a pure plasma, a pure swarm of unassociated electrons. You didn’t even have atomic systems—let alone chemistry, molecular chemistry, life, complex speciated life, and dynamically balanced planetary ecosystems. Each one of those more complex phenomena crystallized out (or emerged, if you will) from the previous systems that had come into existence. So when I say time is speeding up, what I mean really is that more and more is happening. More and more is happening. And if you ask the question: well, what would be the ultimate state of connectivity or of happening? It’s when all points are connected to all other points. Somehow this concept of connectivity is intimately linked to the concept of complexity.

If at any point in this link we can, as it were, be willing to be worried, and then you don’t worry about being worried. Be willing to be afraid, then you don’t have to be afraid of being afraid. And so this, in other words, diminishes the total amount of pain, because it doesn’t allow the painful situation to build itself up and up and up and up.

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.

I’m very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.

You can go into the rocks of this planet and discover life and a continuous fossil record 4.83 billion years deep. The stars that you see when you look out at the Milky Way at night—the average star lasts 500 million years. So we just happen to be in orbit around a very stable, slow-burning type of star. But, in fact, life on this planet has already proven that it is more tenacious than the stars themselves by five times. So you can’t discount biology. Biology is clearly a player on a cosmic scale in this universal game of capturing energy and resisting entropy.

We have to force our evolution. We have to chemically restructure the primate brain so that we do not commit suicide. And the only way to do it in the time left is for the psychedelic community to stand up on its hind legs and roar.

When we look into another person’s eyes, and feel—you know how we turn away? You look, in the subway, at the person sitting opposite you, and you meet their eyes for a moment and then turn off—why? What are we afraid of? The thing that you’re afraid of in the other is you. Isn’t it possible? Isn’t it really possible that this stop? That the fear of looking at the other, touching the other, of recognizing yourself in the other be overcome?

Is a zebra a yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes? The answer is: it is an invisible horse which has been striped yellow and black so that people won’t bump into it. Now, in a similar way, reality is an invisible state of affairs beyond all description and thought, but it has been striped black and white so as to be seen. And this is life and death, up and down, sound and silence—the whole vibratory character of being. And the fundamental game that the universe is playing is to forget that this is so.

We are born in the mystery. It’s all around us. Everything is provisional.

We take our humanness too much for granted. I don’t think we realize how nasty, brutish, and short most of life has been over the centuries, and how, really, only within the confines of the twentieth century has a level of comfort and food availability and shelter and basic creature needs been met, to the point where most people can begin to lead the philosophical life that previously was the privilege of emperors, kings, great courts. Now we all indulge ourselves. We all have the philosopher king’s point of view. We all have a model of history, a model of the future. And we all feel capable of stepping into the shoes of our leaders and discharging that responsibility.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

The degrees of freedom accessible to us are so multifarious that we can actually appreciate for the first time our circumstance, and our circumstance is awe-inspiring. I mean, we are about to take the step out of matter. The planet is on a collision course with the most profound event it’s possible to imagine: the freeing of organic life from the chrysalis of matter. For a billion years there’s been life on this planet, but never life that could step outside of matter. But this is obviously what’s in the cards, and we are privileged to be central to that event.

Do you know that juries have the right to nullify the law? Very few people know that. Actually, that was what the Magna Carta was all about. The barons did not drag King John to Runnymede and put him on starvation rations and hold him prisoner, and force him to sign that document just so that juries could ratify what the government has decided to do. The whole idea of Magna Carta was that juries could make up their own mind what laws they were willing to have imposed upon the English population. And this has been upheld repeatedly, as in the trial of William Penn in 1690, where William Penn was technically guilty of speaking in public. That was against the law at that time—if you had unpopular religious opinions, you couldn’t speak in public. The jury refused to convict him, and the judge ordered the jury locked up until they would convict him. And the jury kept coming, being brought back to court every day from the Tower of London where they were locked up, and they said, “We still find the defendant innocent,” until it became the biggest controversy in London, and finally the judge admitted the jury did have that right. The United States Supreme Court upheld that right, too, in the 1890s in a celebrated case. They ruled that the jury has the right to nullify the law; that the purpose of the jury system is that twelve people, selected at random, can speak for the whole community about what laws they want imposed on them. The Supreme Court also ruled that the judge doesn’t have to tell that to the jury.