I think this belongs here:
Alan Watts:
"All information will come in by superrealistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body—even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual—an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. There may be specialized types, just as there are specialized cells and organs in our bodies. For the tendency will be for all individuals to coalesce into a single bioelectronic body."
"As resources dwindle, population must dwindle in proportion. If, by this time, the race feels itself to be a single mind-body, this superindividual will see itself getting smaller and smaller until the last mouth eats the last morsel. Yet it may also be that, long before that, people will be highly durable plastic replicas of people with no further need to eat. But won't this be the same thing as the death of the race, with nothing but empty plastic echoes of ourselves reverberating on through time? [...] In short, is the next step in evolution to be the transformation of man into nothing more than electronic patterns?"
"If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!"
He wrote this in 1966, with only the TV and radio for inspiration; before the home computer, before the internet became more than a secret military tool... Why did he feel compelled to convince us that his strange vision was benign, and where I wonder, would his remarkable prescience take him today?
The Pythagorean agenda anyone?
"Shinzen talks about Pythagoras and his notion from the 6th century B.C. that the nature of the material world, the nature of number and the inner world of thought, emotion and spirit were connected in a way that if understood could lead to fulfilling the needs of humanity. What Pythagoras and the ancient Greeks needed but didn't have, we have. The confluence of the experimental method, the focus techniques from the east, and the ability to mathematically model these experiments might lead to the achievement of the Pythagorean agenda - the human condition changing in the next century globally and rapidly for the better. Filmed in Santa Barbara in January 2009."
