a koan for Humanity - Chapter THREE

Chapter THREE

Remembering the Future

Imagine for a moment that you come from another world. In this world time runs a bit different than we humans are used to.

In this world you only know linear time.

You´re sent to a blue planet to do some simple research. You´re asked to measure the average temperature over each 30 day period. You manage to communicate with the locals, referring to themselves as homo sapiens sapiens and they tell you they call the time in which you've just landed “April”. They also tell you spring and summer is about to come (whatever that means).

You measure 10 degrees Celsius (50 F), as the average in “April”.

The next period (“we call it May”) you measure 15 degrees, later 20, then 25 and by the end of the 30 days called “August” you've measured 30 degrees Celsius.

During September you´re called home. Back to the place with only linear time.

You´re then asked to estimate what the temperature will be in 90 days (“that´s Christmas time”, the homo sapiens would have told you).

From this basic linear time experience the culture and society you live in strongly believes in linear progression of any phenomena.

You sit down, calculate and tell you bosses: “50 degrees” (122 F).

End of silly story.

We humans so deeply and directly know that some phenomena over time are not linear but cyclic. We know that if that alien researcher would have stayed during September, he would have measured a lower temperature .. and by Christmas it´s for sure not going to be 50 degrees.

Start of an even sillier one.

Whenever you think about the future, what are you reference values for any plans, estimations and so on? Most likely your reference values will come from the past, wont they? Ask anyone on this planet about the future, and they will tell you estimations based upon what they already know. How it was, how it used to be. How it thus most likely somehow will be.

Somehow along a thinking line from the past is how the future is imagined.

Does such a thinking line estimate cyclic, linear or maybe even fully disrupted progressions?

And can it even think the “unthinkable”, like remembering the future?

Until maybe the year 1750 or so, bigger changes that disrupted societies came slow. You were born and by the day you were old, nothing much had changed. In those days such a progression from the past to make predictions about the future actually worked.

Welcome to 2018.

Welcome to disrupt, black swans, game changers, huge surprises, sudden changes on all levels of society.

But still we somehow plan along that old way of thinking, don´t we? At least when we are talking about the “outer world”, meaning business plans, plans of nations and so on.

But what about consciousness itself? Let´s quickly take an integral / SD walk from then to now.