The Earth is not a big rock, infested with living organisms, any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people.

And our existence on the Earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy and our galaxy in its turn is a symptom of the whole company of galaxies.

So in describing my talking at the moment I can’t describe this just as a thing in itself because I’m talking to you. So what I’m doing at the moment is not completely described unless your being here is described also. So if that is necessary if in other words in order to describe my behavior I have to describe your behavior and the behavior of the environment; it means that we really got one system of behavior.

That what I am involves what you are. But the problem is, you see, that we haven’t been taught to feel that way. The myth underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, in it, confronting it, aliens. And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we are the eternal universe.

What we need is a sense of unity. Not an idea of unity, not an ideology of unity, because if there ever was an ideology of unity, it was communism, and the pieces are still falling from the explosion of that system of thought. We need a feeling of unity. Feeling is primary.

It doesn’t come out of intellectual exertation/exhortation. It comes out of a personal act of courage made by the individual. An act of courage which involves surrender. Surrender is the opposite side of the coin of ego. The central issue of our time is our inability to surrender to what we know is right.

We have the ability to feed the hungry. We have the ability to educate our children, to clean up our environment, to eliminate sexism, to eliminate racism. The question is: ‘Can we change our minds fast enough?’

The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural World.

Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; let’s not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let’s not give our control over to the least among us.

Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living World and a re-empowerment of the imagination.