So the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional. The environment grows the organism, and in turn the organism creates the environment.

The organism turns the sun into light, but it requires there to be an environment containing a sun for there to be an organism at all. And the answer to it simply: they’re all one process. And it isn’t that organisms, by chance, came into this World.

To put it, rather, that this World is the sort of environment which grows organisms. It was that way from the beginning. Just in the same way – I mean; the organisms may, in time, have arrived in the scene, or out of the scene, later than the beginning of the scene, but from the moment it went bang in the beginning – if that’s the way it started – organisms like us are sitting here. We’re involved in it.

You see, look here: let’s take the propagation of an electric current … although in the development of any physical system there may by billions of years between the creation of the most primitive form of energy and then the arrival of intelligent life, that billions of years is just the same thing as the trip of that current around the wire. Takes a bit of time.

But it’s already implied; it takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn. And so in any lump of rock floating about in space, there is implicit human intelligence. Sometime, somehow, somewhere. They all go together.

So don’t differentiate yourself and stand off against this and say, I am a living organism in a World made of a lot of dead junk, rocks, and stuff. It all goes together. Those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails. You need rocks. What are you going to stand on?

Our common sense has been rigged, you see, so that we feel strangers and aliens in this World, and this is terribly plausible – simply because it’s what we are used to. That’s the only reason. But when you really start questioning this; say Is that the way I have to assume life is? I know everybody does, but does that make it true? It doesn’t necessarily. It ain’t necessarily so.

And so then, as you question this basic assumption that underlies our culture, you find you get a new kind of common sense; it becomes absolutely obvious to you that you are continuous with the universe.

For example, people used to believe that the people who lived in the Antiquities would fall off [the edge of the Earth], and that was scary. But then, when somebody sailed around the world, and we all got used to it, and now we travel around in jet planes and everything, we have no problem about feeling that the Earth is globular. None whatever. We got used to it.

Well, in a few years, it will be a matter of common sense to very many people that they are one with the universe. It’ll be so simple. And then, maybe – if that happens – we shall be in a position to handle our technology with more sense.

With Love instead of with hate for our environment.