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The 21st century is the best of times. It is not the worst of times.
How can we leverage the best of times to heal the unintended? We can, you know. We just need to understand how things work, including ourselves. A living thing, after all, is self-creating and self-sustaining.
The best of times provides us with unprecedented channels of communication, material well-being and knowledge to continue the innovations that can heal the unintended consequences of our common desire to be safe and to do well. Across the globe, billions are already engaged in these efforts every day.
The problem is that we haven’t yet recognized a common framework, a framework that describes the beings we are today in a way that lends its power to our untapped individual and collaborative creative power.
In this newsletter, I share essays that make use of the dynamic characteristics of living things to suggest a framework. The framework emerges as I ponder multiple unrelated questions.
For example,
How does one get out of a pyramid scheme without it imploding?
What is happiness?
How do we demonstrate our capacity for free will?
What does it mean to be human?
The approach is a back-burner approach. That is, these things are open questions around which to wonder. The wondering leads to imaginative interpretations of what we know and experience at the level of energy and time.
All that is asked is to try to imagine how all things work together, and relentlessly wonder how we may contribute to it all working together for good.
The essays weave together fragments from contemporary science, philosophy and common experience through the fractal forms that reveal the interactions of energy through time. Imagination is the weaver. The question of validity depends upon how one interprets the data. The interpretation is an experience. The experience is yours.
Why Imagine? Einstein noted that we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. We are products of our own thinking and doing. It’s only through making the effort to step outside of ourselves that we are able, bit by bit, to appreciate the possibilities and pleasures of that which is “other,” that which is a “known unknown,” or perhaps even things that are as yet “unknown unknowns.”
How fortunate we are to live at this time! We as a species are exploring galaxies previous generations did not know exist. We are peering into the processes by which life reveals itself in the cell, and into the autonomous living creatures a single cell may become through its self-organized development. Consider yourself for example, a community of billions of self-creating and self-sustaining cells!
What I didn’t know and decided to test in my own anecdotal being is this: Are we able to train our own longing and desires? Could a change in my amygdala’s response to an unanticipated event indicate I had leveraged my capacity for free will?
We are able to shift an obsessive thought that impedes us, to a scintillating one that feeds us. The things we think about become larger. The larger a thing is, the closer it appears. The closer a thing of desire, the greater the reward. Rather than having our thoughts rule us, with practice we become more and more adept at ruling them.
I’m practical, the child of Mayflower Pilgrims, Irish Catholic orphans, and Fortune 500 entrepreneurs. I’m also intuitive. Quite often, my intuitions don’t make sense to me. When this happens, I put the questions into “back-burner” mode.
I was raised in the post-World War II era of progress: a girl could become anything she wanted to become. What did I want to become? That was a different sort of back-burner question.
What if love really does make the world go round?
A logical reply might be, “What is love?” Asking this question as an unruly teenager, I realized that whatever love is, it’s not always perceived as a local phenomenon. The question “What is love?” became another of my back-burner questions.
Hanging in there with curiosity, following the threads through the “social prosthetic” that the Internet provides, the Cambrian explosion of knowledge, in the still of the heart, even in the still of the heart of darkness, pilings of good-will-empowered improvisation and innovation emerge.
Today, the fruits of our prolific success threaten to overwhelm us in detritus. We have done so many things well - with unintended consequences. We have the tools, the impetus and the time. But with so many levels of interconnected issues, and so many people living side by side in seemingly parallel yet antagonist universes, how do we even begin?
Perhaps a good place to begin is to recognize that human beings are a social species that is still in the process of evolving; that we are at a tipping point with the energetic conditions primed for a phase change; and that through the foggy haze of rigid extremes and chaotic destruction, solid foundations of age-old collaboration are bearing functional fruit that will carry us forward.
There is a way to imagine the dynamics of our daily duty in a way that facilitates flow.
That is, that though we may indeed resemble ants in the way we become habituated to respond in particular situations, we have an amazing capacity to step outside our own experience, to look at it from other points of view. The more we practice this ability, and the more it becomes our habit, the more we become aware of the source of our free will. And with this awareness, growing respect for the world around us as it is, and a deepening desire to contribute kindly and selflessly to where it is going.
Subscribe to explore the connections I’m finding. We can all find a place to stand that gives us the levers to move the world. Please join the conversation. I would love to hear from you!
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