When you take a longer slice, you realize that the existence of the individual is like an illusion, and that, really, the planet is involved in some kind of chemical process which is like a gene-swarming. And it’s been going on for a billion years.
You see, an organism is a chemical system which does not run down. The second law of thermodynamics says that the whole universe tends toward the dissipation of structure and the release of energy in heat, and then everything—all structure, all energy—is dissipated. But life has achieved the miracle—by being an open system and taking material into it, and extracting energy from it, and getting rid of waste—life has been able to leave the main stream of thermodynamic degradation and establish itself at an equilibrium point off that graph, and maintain itself there for (at least on this planet alone) four billion years.
This is really the central problem in Western thinking, I think: the tension between dualism and unity, and matter and spirit, and how do you handle it? I think that we are spiritualizing matter. This is what technology is: that the spiritualizing of matter is the highest expression of our technological output, and that this will become more and more what we are about. So that, in the next century, the difference between mind and brain and cell and machine will all have been subsumed under a new vocabulary, because we are hardwiring our minds, and we are making the artifacts of our culture intelligent, and we are breaking down the barriers between ourselves, between ourselves and larger databases, and this kind of thing, so that the old “I’m an ego inside a skin” definition gives way to some kind of much more malleable and plastic thing.
Imagine the people who lived in times when the temporal river was stagnant, or even when counter-currents swept it backwards. This is the anguish of the ancestors. This is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed. The pogroms and the invasions and the atrocities conducted across history can only be somehow redeemed if we—who are the living wavefront of this genetic experience—do not fumble the ball. All our ancestors are watching to see how we will do.
You discover that, if you can do anything, the only values which have any meaning—if you can do anything and have anything—are aesthetic values. So that if you could travel anywhere instantly, how would you travel? You would walk! Obviously! You know? Because it’s so tasteful. Because it’s so completing. It’s such a complete reverence for space and time and your own body and the correctness of the situation. Time and time at La Chorrera someone would be doing something some way, and someone else would say, “Well, if you’re omniscient, why don’t you just make it be done?” And the answer is: because it’s crass to do that. You know? The way to do things, if you can do anything, is to do them right.
Outer space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. It’s a vast unfilled void into which anything whatsoever can be projected. The hallucinations of the individual are the cultural artifacts of the species 500 years from now. I mean, all these visions and dreams that we have will be realized—in ways that we cannot imagine, but realized nevertheless. This has been consistently what has been going on. The alchemical dreams of the sixteenth century are fully realized in the twentieth century, you know? And of course it has facets that they never imagined.
The real question mark which hangs over all this is the nature of mind. And we do not know what mind is, and yet everything goes on upon the stage that is conditioned by and assumes mind as a given. And every society has assumed that it had the answers—that just fifteen years more of fine-tuning of the current ideology would do it. And no society has ever been right about that, so why should we be right? We are hurtling toward an unimaginable future in the same way that our present would have been unimaginable to people 200 or 500 years ago. But it is the imagination, because it is consciousness that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself.
Obviously, consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible at all costs in all times and places, because it is a lack of consciousness that will be toxic to our species and the planet. Consciousness is the saving grace, and so it has to be cultivated by any means available.
We are the species that is deputized to use energy to do the thing for all life on the planet. That’s why I’m not pessimistic about history and I don’t see history as unnatural or somehow opposed to nature. What history is is a 10,000-year process by which the monkeys attain enough understanding of physical processes to build the habitats into which all life on the planet can then migrate. That’s what I was talking about this morning when I said I think the planet senses the finiteness of its existence, and that biology is a wild scheme for getting out to the stars for dispersal of life. And you’re right. But we have great hubris, and believe we are doing this, and man will go to the stars. It’s more that man is the pecking beak of the cosmic chick in the egg of life on Earth, and the entire bird will emerge and fly. But it was man—with his atomic weapons and his radar and all this—who can break the shell. And then the whole of the biosphere will flow outward into space and escape the cycle of energy degradation that will eventually turn this solar system into a group of cold cinders rotating around a red giant, or something.
It’s been a commonplace of Western cosmology since Darwin—although it’s never been elevated to the status of a law, or even a principle—that steady complexification has occurred in the universe since its very beginning.
If the universe is—let’s take the long view and say 20 billion years old—then the first 10 billion years, not very much happened that was interesting in the realm of complexity. There was star formation and the percolation of heavy chemistry, but not life—or it’s doubtful that life occurred in the early universe. So what we see, then, is the emergence of more and more complex animal forms at a greater and greater speed. And then, finally, the emergence of self-reflection in the primates. And then epigenetic methods of encoding information—in other words, writing and storytelling and language. And at each point what is happening is: there’s a progressive time-binding of energy and a progressive intensification and speed-up of the complexification of certain parts of the universe. Right now, the most complex part of the universe that we know is the human brain-mind situated in its network of computers and cultural conventions and social obligations and expectations and hopes and fears and historical aspirations, et cetera. This is the realm of the densely-packed that the Buddhists are talking about. So it seems to me that this should be seen as the operation of a general law. And we are not outside of this—we are, in fact, the cutting edge of it. Somehow, of all the animal species on the Earth, the human beings are carriers of this temporal speeding-up process which is now engulfing the entire planet.
I used the word “novelty” out of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, because he had this notion that novelty was the concrescing of a force which knits things together. And I like that; that’s what I felt it was: that the Tao is making itself, and that this compression of novelty through the speeding-up of time will eventually reach a place where everything is connected to everything else. And this is, you know, the universe’s self-birthing of itself.
Far from the universe being a steady-state entity uninfluenced by the existence of the human mind—which is going to go on and exist for billions of years until the stars burn out and the second law of thermodynamics is going to reduce everything to heat death—that that’s all wrong. A hundred percent wrong. And that, actually, the universe is made by mind (within and without organism), and that mind is capable of bootstrap leaps in its organizational self-expression. And that we are privileged to be the witnesses of the final act of life going through some kind of immense, transformative unfolding from itself in a kind of vortex which has been building on this planet for billions of years, but which has been accelerating to, you know, such excruciating intensities over the last 25,000 years that it has called forth self-reflective intelligence from the monkeys, and the invention of quantum physics, and spaceflight, and shamanism. And it is novelty upon novelty; novelty so intensified that the genetic machinery can no longer carry it. And it bubbles out into the epigenetic: into art and language and poetry and religion and religious mania and romanticism, and all of these things. It is a progressive knitting-together, an expression of the universe’s will to become, that causes me to think that we may be in the shorter gyres—as William Butler Yeats called them; the shortening spirals—of this vortex of novelty and compression.
The culmination of man’s God-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it’s not that we are doing it, you see, it’s that a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding. And that is what all this cross-connectedness of man into matter, plant into animal, earth into space—all of this flowing and interconnectedness, this reaches right down into the rocks of the planet. This is not simply a phenomenon of biology. This is the unfolding of a general law of which biology is only the cutting edge of a wedge of becomingness which includes all being, and reaches right down into the neutrinos.
I think that probably we are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself; that the planet itself is aware of the finiteness of planetary existence. And it’s sort of like the story of the ant and the grasshopper. You can have a planetary consciousness which says, “Well, I look forward to 3–5 billion years of sentient existence. And then I’m willing to be extinguished with the death of my star.” Or you can have a planet with an ant-like mentality that says, “I can sense winter coming 3–5 billion years down the line, and I’m going to organize some wild strategy to break through the tyranny of the energy cycle of one star, and I’m going to organize biological existence so that greater and greater amounts of energy can be brought under control.” So that, eventually, a kind of liberation can occur where life can burst out of the planetary cradle and disperse itself through the universe.
We are beginning to explore: what is humanness ontologically? That’s what people are really talking about when they say, “Can machines think? Will machines think?” They mean: “Is what we have focused in on as the defining factor of our being that sets us apart from all other things something which we could manufacture?” And the answer is probably to some degree: yes. Because much of what is intelligence—or appears superficially to be intelligence—is simply data and retrieval. So that, you know, more and more of the culture is being hardwired into an electronic coral reef that is simply the outermost of each of our own exoskeletons. We all have telephones in our homes. Many of us have computer terminals. These things introduce us to a global skin of information. But as the hardware grows more and more unobtrusive we will more and more come to identify these things with our own ego. We won’t even realize that we’re being charged for thinking about certain questions because we’re actually accessing a database somewhere which is feeding us data. So that the commonality of mind is, I think, going to be—somehow, the triumph of socialism will be the commonality of mind in a capitalist context. That there really will be an ocean of thought that you will swim in and that will be composed of deeper and deeper levels of integrated information.