Reaching Forward
Life Dimensions #4: Bold Futures
As I continue to explore these directions, this week I go horizontal, and head into the unknown. There is so much to be said about the Future, and I’ve said much of it in my poetry over the years. As with all of these, it’s an interesting challenge to separate it from the Past and the Present, who I will also visit soon; and it leads to other bubblings, future-focused, that will reveal themselves I’m sure over the weeks to come.
Once you start recognising the co-existence of multiple dimensions, futures get really interesting. One-dimensional trajectories have always been objects of hilarity once the bigger picture is known, and often sources of misery until it is. Mainstream conceptions of the days to come tend to show us naivety, when we look back at them. The 1960s version of the future, be it Dr Who or Thunderbirds or Star Trek, painted rosy 1960s pictures for the most part accompanied by various kinds of tape recording equipment from a thousand years hence; or dystopian ones informed by the 'realities' of the previous few decades. We've not raised ourselves too much from that particular mire. Six years ago I was feeling both inspired and weirded out by someone's tech vision of the pace of change, particularly with the approach of greater machine learning (which we misleadingly call 'AI' and really need to stop doing so). The results of this so far have been, it seems, to already dull some of our higher order thinking, as analysed in the minds of some of those making use of ChatGPT most frequently. Meanwhile the algorithm continues to troll me by telling me about courses for ‘men over 50 who don’t know how to use AI yet’.
Maybe driverless cars are still something to get excited about, though we humans seem to like the risk of the steering wheel too much, and definitely get freaked at the notion of handing over such decision-making too much to our mechanical progeny. Bladerunner's moral dilemmas are at the forefront of much current technological anxiety. Futuristic visions in the last century and a bit have been associated with some of the most grotesque totalitarian notions, as imposed versions of the future closed down other possibilities. Some began fairly benign on paper: communist vanguards doing away with unjust hierarchy; and of course the original fascists in Italy were accompanied by artists excited about the virility of technology. Progress is a big future idea; but not all Progressives are equal in their forward-thinking, some are just jumping on a current body of persuasion that makes them feel good, like Bolsheviks or Nazis did before going to war. Development is another big future idea, where whole regions of the world get labelled Developing, mostly those that previously got crushed when Imperialism was the big idea. 'Developing' into a shiny capitalist consumption-based Future around the corner for all. When the true Future the planet may need us to live into may have more in common with frugality, as practiced in cultures that are less Developed, or the morning after too many Easter eggs.
Best, as ever, to take a step back from the head, and vision what we really want with a little more involvement from the heart and the body. I've often led an exercise getting people to mime what their bodies get up to on a typical work day; what their ancestors' bodies might have been doing a couple of centuries back before industrialism took over; and what they would wish for their descendants' bodies in a couple of centuries time. That makes it clear we're at a rather rigid turning point as far as our bodies are concerned: they know what they'd prefer to be up to, and it isn't plugged in 24-7. Thoughts undoubtedly make the future, so let's make sure they're embodied and ensouled. Our current overconsumption is born from our recent ancestors' dreams of material comfort, coming out of times of desperate material want, exacerbated by the twin disasters of industrialised factories and colonial rampage. So self-driving vehicles in the hi-tech city? Sounds great but is also apparently one way to get your every move analysed by Big Brother. It all smells a little less appealing to me than it did when I read that ‘benefits of AI’ piece six years ago.
I'm good at the past, I think. I dive into history like others dive into chipping marble or peeling away layers of skin. The future is a different beast: ethereal. Impossible to really see what's coming from there and what's just our filters. But that impossibility is also liberating: it allows infinities of possibility. Very difficult to teach, though we really need Future Studies as a school topic. What that would look like is classes that start with taking a breath, feeling into the heart, and looking forward. Way forward, till after we've all left this place. To envision the lives of those seven generations hence, and act with that vision, was once common sense - still is, among the wisdom keepers of the world. Yet in a culture that avoids thinking of our own death, avoids thinking about much beyond a cancerous growth model of economics, thinking of Them is a radical act. Them - the generations to come, some of whom might be us taking another turn, who knows. In some futures, they are living their best lives: and when we experience them, commune with them, journey with the eyes of our soul to visit them, embodying our imagination to reach them - we can come back knowing a little more of what we must do here now to make That version of the future possible.
When I speak with my descendants, I may not literally be talking of blood relatives. Whether we have our own children or not, there are those that will come after us. Future Visions that will uplift are, for me, filtered through dreams, whether sleeping and waking. And as I alluded to in my last written meditation, dreams are deeply tied to the Heart, to a language we cannot yet speak in a simple logical way. So it is with the future: the pictures I have that inspire me, I understand to be something I can only express in a limited way in this present moment. Visions of dancing cities, made from natural materials, with flora and fauna in abundance, with replenished soils that sprout bigger forests, with artists on dynamic structures conjuring up exquisite pieces in ephemeral mediums, using wavelengths we have yet to experience, with awareness of the background symphony of the living earth, and people living in gratitude for this realm of spirit made manifest. We have the brilliance to build such visions together, if we can get out of each other's ways and stop imposing futures in top-down forms. For my future vision, from my heart, is one of new global networks of human-sized communities we have to co-create, sharing knowledge, methodologies, ways of playing - guided by more transparent understanding of power and love.
This comes back to our heart-sense, of course, of our personal future, which can be guided by the awareness of a benevolent version of Death, somewhere up ahead. As we step forward, Death is out there somewhere, bringing rest from our wrestling with the trials of this life. The past we can know while the future we can't; except that both are stories, incompletely spoken, about a direction of life travel that looks relentless but cycles back frequently. And so the yogis observe us in our hamster wheels and laugh. Even our older selves can be imaginatively invoked to help us out now: writing wiser words about our current crises, if we allow that imagining to work for us. Certainly, positive energies from our visions of better futures can be brought back to the Now (where it's been recorded that people with such visions live happier lives). So it's well worth cultivating internally.
And it's also worth exploring on the collective level. Prophets and seers have always stepped up, catching some glimpses from a bigger plan we often grasp at in the dark. Tarot cards help us more prosaic types to emulate them, through dreamlike interpretations. Later we can often see how they were right, even if rarely fully so. The curious thing is that the story of the future is true while also being ushered into possibility; futures traders have just as much of this as astrologers. Most of the biggest religions on the planet were brought about by confident prophets, speaking truths that will indeed become true if enough belief surrounds them. The meek are waiting for their moment that must be coming. Synchronicities are often hints of this; and shamans in the city actively work with redesigning the future based on being uplifted by what they’re spotting in the moment, be it a colour on a flagpole, a passing smile, the screech of a cat, or a magical number plate. Tapping into the mystery is the only way to play powerfully with the future. It can of course be lonely, being too far avant the garde. While the mainstream headed sleepily towards World War One, and enraged rioters threw things because of the (to us) benign sounds of Debussy or Stravinsky. It takes courage to envision and declare it.
So aspirationally open-hearted circular-economy nature-connected artistically thriving diverse community systems, lasting for more than a temporary experimental phase? The past is littered with such attempts at future forms that crashed. And then there are others that are surviving; some stepping determinedly out of the mainstream, building walls and getting labelled as sects and cults (as if the default world were somehow less dangerous than the experiment, which is not to diminish the genuine corruption in some of those experiments too). Some of my favourite people and ideas have emerged from these messy experiments. Myself included, given my upbringing in the Transcendental Meditation movement, a source of much wisdom alongside its oddities. So when I choose to explore “leaving the machine” it is inevitably to these networks, loci, hubs that I turn. Some even in cities, like multiple experiments in my own suburb over the decades. While the news churns onwards with a Business As Usual plan that is heading towards a brick wall. In my vision, humanity still swerves before we hit the wall, though it is entirely possible that that only happens in another iteration of Creation that we are dreaming. At the same time, the New is only valid, it seems, if it grows healthy roots. Many of our attempts at the New are archaeological at heart, questing to be worthy of ancestors we’ve lost sight of.
Some of the tools for stepping forward with Vision I’ve alluded to. In the place of Possibility, dream big, as Goethe almost said. When we enter a stage and improvise, we bring a little more joyful possibility into the matrix of life. It’s a web, but not a limiting one, for matrix – mother – is just the source of our next step, and the way we share that step with others. Many of us might not feel ready for stepping off-grid yet: it’s pioneer territory and we don’t necessarily have that way of being in the world. Paradoxically, trying to build new forms of community can be quite a lonely space, like the acidic little plants on the edge of the forest. Without a strong relationship with Spirit, I doubt it’s going to make it. Findhorn was born, and is still going decades later, because somebody listened to the elves. It needs forces from Outside our materialist-capitalist-insanity mindset to give us the strength to resist the social pressures within it. There are concepts that can help us with this Future Generating – such as tools from the Work That Reconnects, about which I shall speak further; a rich body of thought and practice that helps to keep the collective heart-vision strong and growing. The Pachamama Alliance was born from a conversation with the Achua people of the Amazon, who understood that what most needs to be done for the planet in this time is that the collective Dream of the West needs a vibrant, cosmic update. So let’s visualize that epoch of world peace-love-alive-laughter that is just around the next bend. Imagine, and keep doing so, for there are neural heart-mycelium networks between us all that spread new learnings at instantaneous rates when we find the right frequency on the invisible dial.
There is stillness in all this, just as rest comes at the end of the day. Awareness that our little piece to be done is all that we need to do. The future can feel relentless, so this sense is an important counterweight. When speaking once in a deeply theatrical Imagination, to my descendants from two centuries ahead, I was humbled and relieved by their message to me and those I love. I came back ready for the next step to build healthy future relating, to strengthen the world wise web. And later I visited them again, and again. At this time of fracture, it’s essential that we re-member, a future-focused action. Of course remembering, a past-focused action, can help this too, as long as it’s truly embodied and we don’t get stuck wallowing in the tragedies. Who could have predicted that Hitler’s People’s Car would become a decorated source of flower power a short while later. We may need a similar counterculture now to drive forward a sense of better Utopian visions. A forgiving peace festival of the future on the site of past trauma: these are the kinds of ways that we heal ourselves and the land. It starts with each of us stepping over and finding ways to share our Visions, with breath, collective listening. Not escaping to the stars, but blasting into our hearts on this extraordinary planet.