The basic principle—the thing I really want to try and get across—is this idea of goingwith. The universe around you is your outside just as much as the organs inside your skin are your inside.
Every complex organism, as a whole, has an intelligence greater than any one of its parts.
The industrial-natural complex in which we live is something that is going in a certain direction on its own, whether you like it or not, and it is able to organize your behavior in a more intelligent way than you can organize it.
We shall find ourselves increasingly organized by an intelligent system that is not under our conscious direction, but will make us feel, I suppose, rather as our individual cells feel inside our bodies.
The Earth, as the geosphere, is covered with a biosphere—that is the sphere of living organisms. The biosphere, in turn, generates the noösphere, which is the communication network that we call the mind. Through literature, through speech, through radio and television communication, the noösphere is slowly realized.
The synergy—the quality of intelligence in the total system—will overcome the folly of individuals, or of parts who are unable to act with full understanding of what’s going on.
The intelligence of the system—the synergy—is more intelligent than any individual consciousness can be.
The intelligence of the universe grows as it grows you.
Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that we human beings are intelligent. Now, if that is so, then the environment in which we live must also be intelligent, because we are symptoms of that environment. And I don’t for the life of me see how you can have intelligent symptoms of an unintelligent organization. We belong in this world. We didn’t arrive here from somewhere else; we’re not tourists in the universe. We’re expressions of it like branches express the tree, or fruit express the tree. And so you will not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. That is to say, the environment in which you live will be a system of mutual cooperation between a vast complexity of different kinds of organisms. And the total balance of that makes your life possible.
Flowers and insects have an arrangement with each other whereby one could say of flowers and bees that—although they look very different—they are one and the same organism. Flowers perfume and color, bees buzz and fly around. But you can’t have the flowers without the bees and you can’t have the bees without the flowers.
The Taoists, you see, recognized that there is this universal organism, and they thought of the cosmos as a great organism without a boss. There is no one in Chinese philosophy making the world happening, or ordering it. There is no, as it were, central principle in the middle which sends out commands to all the subordinate parts, but rather, that the thing organizes itself—their word for nature being zìrán, meaning “what is so of itself.” So they saw the whole cosmos as a self-regulating organism. And they further saw that the individual is not merely a part of that organism, he is an expression of the whole thing, and the whole depends upon this expression just as much as the expression depends upon it.
What kind of universe would you design if you were God? And I recommend—I’m not going to go into this because it’s a long story—but I thoroughly recommend it as an exercise in thought: model your own universe and see what comes out of it. Because I can only tell you that you will eventually discover that you will model this one.
When you look out at the stars, you are in roughly the same situation or relationship to what you are seeing as when a physicist studies the constitution of the atom.
The odd thing is that this wretched little chemical thing can reflect an image of the whole cosmos—in its vastness—inside his head, and can know he’s there.
Just as the wheel is an extension of the feet—and as, beyond the wheel, naturally, comes the horse and carriage, the automobile, and the airplane—all these technological creations are extensions of the human organism. And finally, the electronic network—of telephone, telegraph, radio, and television—is an extension of the nervous system.
We are already the most remarkable electronic patterns from the standpoint of physics.
One should think about this funny thing of technology considered as artificiality in the light of the realization that there really is nothing artificial. You might say the distinction of the artificial from the natural is a very artificial distinction; that the constructs of human beings are really no more unnatural than bees’ nests, and birds’ nests, and constructs of animal and insect beings. They’re extensions of ourselves.
In this sense, there might be a very, very close fellowship between all people in which there are no barriers, no defenses, and we all cooperate together beautifully and love each other.
He who has nothing to lose has really no fear.
Money is nothing but bookkeeping. It is figures. It is a way of measuring what you owe the community and what the community owes you.
This was the situation of the Great Depression when, here, we were still—in a material sense—a very rich country, with plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories; everything going. But suddenly—because of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about the economy, about the banking—we were all miserable and poor, starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real, and that people ought to suffer in order to get it. But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering.
The one way of not doing anything about a situation is feeling guilty about it. Because when people feel guilty about a situation, most usually—instead of doing something practical to change it—they resort to all sorts of symbolic methods of expiation. They go to confession. They see an analyst. They do all kinds of things which will be ways of actually not doing anything about the problem, but feeling alright about it instead.
It is not a serious failing in a human being to make mistakes.
The answer is: no, you’re not gonna make it. You’re gonna get away with it for a while. Yup! You’ll get away with it for a while—but in the end, no, you’re not gonna make it.