What would ultra-intelligence look like? In other words, what would a global mind actually have to say, or would it have to say anything? And more importantly, what would it do with its fingers on the world resource extraction apparatus, research and development facilities, stock markets, world price of gold, platinum, iridium?

Although we are not stalked on the ground, we are nevertheless inseparable from a huge social context of… well, to begin with, parents, siblings, people who work for us and everything. I mean, it’s just impossible to cut ourselves off from a social environment—and also, furthermore, from a natural environment. We are that. There’s no clear way of drawing the boundary between this organism and everything that surrounds it. And yet, the image of ourselves that we have does not include all those relationships.

What you have to realize is that life is a pattern of immense complexity.

What sort of a gamble is worth making? Is life, is existence, a gamble where we should say: well, you’ve got to be kind of careful about this. Don’t get too involved, you see? Don’t put your shirt on it. Play it cool and cautious. Well, I’m going to ask: what are you going to win on the basis of that game? All you’ll win, you see, is anxiety. That’s all you’ll get. You’ll get enough goodies to make you go on being anxious.

We must discover by trying it out whether the ordering tendency in organic nature and in the human organism and mind, properly exploited, is not more helpful than God ever was. If only simple ideas can save the world, here is one that might. It has great power.

We, Homo sapiens, after nearly four billion years of evolution, are the de facto nervous system of Gaia. We are the planetary brain species.

In the idea of “nothing special” (or buji) there is a way of saying: “But look at ordinariness! Look what you miss every moment!”

When you look at the history of the universe (if you look with unbiased eyes) I think what you will see is that the universe is a novelty-producing and -conserving system of some sort.

One could begin to dream of a world in which nature was seen as alive, in which the imagination permeated all reality, in which animals and plants are seen as part of the living texture, the living components, the cells, and the life of Gaia, and Gaia in the life of the cosmos as a whole.

We have a fixed notion of the separation between man and nature which is a barbarous superstition. You are not separate from the external world. Your skin does not divide you from what’s outside because your skin is what biologists call an osmotic membrane. In other words, it’s full of holes, pores, through which you breathe. It’s full of nerve ends through which you feel. And it’s therefore an envelope by means of which you communicate with the so-called outside world.

It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.

There is an interdependence of flowers and bees: where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They’re really one organism. And so, in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. So it’s interconnected. And so the many, many patterns of interconnections lock it all together into a unity which is, however, much too complicated for us to think about except in very, very simple, crude ways.

If you know that, and you’re grounded on that sensation that it’s really all alright, then you can go into the work of correcting and doing things that need to be done right now without losing your temper.

All falling apart. Everything is. That’s the great assistance to you. See, that fact—that everything is in decay—is your helper. That is allowing you that you don’t have to let go because there’s nothing to hold on to. It’s achieved for you, in other words, by the process of nature. So once you see that you just don’t have a prayer, and it’s all washed up, and that you will vanish and leave not a rack behind—and you really get with that—suddenly you find you have the power; this enormous access of energy. But it’s not power that came to you because you grabbed it. It came in entirely the opposite way. And power that comes to you in that opposite way is power with which you can be trusted.

The male-dominant agenda is so fragile that any competitor is felt as a deadly foe.

“I” is like “eye:” it’s an aperture through which the universe is examining itself.

Our imagination makes us intensely conscious of a life we must live which transcends the individual life and contradicts the biological meaning of the instinct of self-preservation.

The phone or Google or the Internet can, in principle, play the same role that that biological memory was playing: part of the mind—if not part of consciousness.

So long as a natural particle (a molecule, for example) contains in its structure no more than a small number (some tens, or some hundreds, or even some thousands) of organized atoms, no external trace can be distinguished of what we call life. If, however, the number of atoms incorporated rises to several tens of millions (as would seem to be the case with the organic ‘viruses’, vegetal animals) then the chemical characteristics develop a fringe of biological properties in the element concerned.

The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth, a renovation whose physical degree of reality we must now consider and whose outline we must make clearer.

When every certainty is shaken and every utterance falters, when every principle appears doubtful, then there is only one ultimate belief on which we can base our rudderless interior life: the belief that there is an absolute direction of growth, to which both our duty and our happiness demand that we should conform; and that life advances in that direction, taking the most direct road.

In every one of the 100 trillion cells in your body there’s the contents of a complete library of instructions on how to make every part of you. Those cells are smart.

The Hindu society always recognizes the right of an individual to break from society.

Who tells how to apply the yardstick of preservation of life, survival, and advancement of the species?