If the Eastern conception that “the universe is mind” has any operational impact in the world, it will be through conceiving of mind as the underlying, self-aware, self-active, world-forming grammar of being. So that what Freud called the superego, what I call the overmind—there have been different ways of talking about it—has to be seen not as a passive homeostatic controlling device, but actually as the most intelligent organization on this planet. And we are all only components of this, believing ourselves to be the highest expression of freedom, but it is actually at the species level that organization is controlled. And that’s why the emergence of ideas—like the calculus or the invention of LSD or the steam engine—why these things have the curious property of being regulated from above: it’s because the world is not nearly as chaotic and random as we suppose. We are actually trapped inside a giant organism. And it is not Gaia—that’s a much larger organism. We are trapped inside a large organism which is the human collectivity. And that’s why we are such different monkeys: because there is this group mind—which none of us is aware of or has ever perceived—that is actually mediating the human experience. And it is no more apprehendable to us than the group mind of an anthill is apprehendable to us. It can’t be seen.
Everything that we are doing is informational deployment. I mean, we take in raw materials and we excrete manufactured objects which are essentially ideas. We take in air and we expel words. Everything that we do is about stamping higher orders of information on unorganized lower forms of raw material. And it’s moving out of us, moving out of our bodies.