You know, just like mountains stick out of the Earth and there’s a fundamental Earth underneath them, so all of us, as different things, we stick out of reality and there’s a continuity underneath.

The first manifestation that humanity may make good on this planet will be the serious introduction of cosmic costing into the mainstream deliberations of Earthians.

Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.

Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that cosmos—ancient and vast—from which we spring.

A new way of seeing, combined with a new way of acting—that is what we need.

Your thoughts are like an onion: when you peel it, it makes you cry. And you keep peeling it and peeling and peeling it, and there’s nothing in the center! It’s just all leaves, which can create a lot of pain in your eyes. And the best part of it—even the word “onion:” an onion, it goes on and on with an “I” in the middle. That’s so lovely! And that’s what your thoughts do. They go on and on because there’s an “I” in there somewhere; there’s a me. And that’s a lovely way to stop your thoughts. If you ever had a bit of non-self—it’s not my thoughts, it’s not my life, none of my business. It’s so easy for thoughts to stop when you take the center out of them: me.

Within the biosphere, matter is markedly heterogeneous and may be distinguished as inert matter or living matter. The inert matter greatly predominates in mass or volume. There is a continual migration of atoms from the inert matter to living matter and back again.

Washington is convulsed over the possibility of closing an air base near Sacramento. So how can we even conceive of this government making an impact on the real problems? It is still government by flimflam. And that would be all very well if we had five hundred years to dig ourselves out of this dilemma. But if a radical political alternative is not opened up in this country, then we are essentially, I think, going to amuse and entertain ourselves into extinction. The ordinary orthodox system has failed. What Bill Clinton exists to prove—at best!—is that people of good will make no difference in those institutions, because they are compromised and corrupted from the very beginning. It’s just the way it is. Those institutions are set up for business as usual. Business as usual (at this point) is a death sentence on the human race.

A growing Noosphere discourse proposes a meaningful narrative and vision for the future, where the geosphere, the biosphere and the noosphere—including humans and machines—could work in concert to unleash a new level in evolution.

Part of the antidote to informational overwhelmement, to social islanding, to trivialization, is rational discourse conducted—if necessary—at high volume. People are so concerned that nobody feel hurt or rejected or, you know—well, in intellectual discourse you don’t want people to feel hurt, you want them to feel destroyed if their position merits that! We’re all grown-ups. We don’t have to coddle each other for crying out loud! Send the inner child down to the baths and sharpen your rhetorical knives and logical razors, and do that kid a favor. Make sense out of your life and reality. There’s sense to be made. And it’s very grown-up, and very exalting, and it doesn’t have to exclude all the other fun and games of life. But it certainly gives cogency and meaning to the enterprise not only of trying to live, and not only of trying to be a decent person for one’s loved ones and children, but to build a better world. A better world, if it comes, will be built on clear thinking. It will be built on honesty. It will be built on direct, clear communication. I mean, these are the things that constitute visionary common sense, and it’s because the world is topsy-turvy that I—considered, you know, a drug-crazed pariah—have to then become the apostle of order, dignity, adult behavior, responsibility, and the obligation to make sense.

Sustained and guided by the tradition of the great human mystical systems, along the road of contemplation and prayer, we succeed in entering directly into receptive communication with the very source of all interior drive.

In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing devices.

Arcologies are architectural organisms.

In our daily meanders, we are more likely to stumble across a particular small number (say “5”) than a particular large one (say “53783425456”). The larger number requires far more digits to simultaneously fall into place just so, and thus is far less likely. Similarly, although we exist in many of all possible universes, we are most likely to find ourselves in the simplest of those, the few that require the least number of things to be just so. The universe’s great size and age, its physical laws, and our own long evolution may be just the working of the simplest possible rules that produce our minds.

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.

The Internet as it exists today is just a little baby. But it’s on the verge of a fundamental transition. Today it’s a distributed network of content and software, serving diverse people diverse functions. Soon enough it will be a self-organizing intelligent system, with its own high-level coherent patterns, serving not only as a mind but as a world inhabited by a diversity of digital life forms.

The Earth is not, as it is in a Western worldview, a potentially harmful place made up of “inanimate” or “dumb” matter. She is alive, but different from human life forms.

The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything.

Difference and every kind of variety of differentiation is the way through which unity is discovered.

The minds of machines and the minds of human beings are very different; so different that each party questions whether the other even has a mind.

Reality is itself a combination of determinisms, and freedom consists in overcoming and transcending these determinisms.

Holy evolution is so generously but sternly working at producing ever more complex futures so as to transform the simple non-living reality into a complex, live, and vivifying process.

Civilized man has developed the incredible technique of symbolization—of words (which represent things and events), of numbers (which represent patterns and arrangements of physical nature), of social institutions (laws, states, family patterns), and so on. And in these terms he represents the physical world in the same way the menu represents the dinner. But he has been so fascinated by the power of this symbolic way of looking at things that he very easily confuses it with what it represents, and so has a tendency to eat the menu instead of the dinner.

An enormous number of people are apparently addicted to music. Now, music—when you look at it from a strictly practical survival point of view—music is a waste of time. You don’t really need music, do you? I mean, you could go on and you could do your business without any music at all. Music’s a luxury. And yet, it is a major industry today; producing music. And I suppose you could say—Ed Dalton made the suggestion—that people who are addicted to music have a disease called chorditis. And really, music should be stopped. It’s such a terrific waste of time. It achieves nothing constructive and is really, therefore, very bad for you because you become hung up on it. You can’t do without music if you’re a real music lover. And music even isn’t something you eat! It’s just something you listen to. But boy, can you become addicted to it! So should we get rid of it?