Are There Futures We Don't Create?

Every moment, the multiple forces of the Universe are at work, bringing into our individual circumstances, new challenges, burdens, and opportunities. It is extremely uncommon for people to co-create the death of a family member, a devastating event of nature, or the wondrous thrills of rescue, of a sunset, or the miracle of birth. So many things happen beyond our locus of control.

It seems that how we react or respond is only partially within our ability of control. Try to suppress the tears or make them stream. Try to quench that belly laugh or manufacture it. All of us learn techniques that help us filter the incoming information. The coping mechanisms we developed as children are called defense mechanisms by psychologists. They are our ways of making it through a day. It is amazing how resourceful our system is for adaptation.

It is not uncommon for these resourceful defense mechanisms to remain embedded in our system on into adulthood. When do we shift gears and start looking at life from a different perspective? What causes or allows one's consciousness to expand beyond the narrow view of the world that we developed as children? Even after having multiple experiences of expanding consciousness, why would we revert back to an earlier world view in certain situations? I expect that you have your own answers to these questions and your answers are the important ones.

Believe it or not, I saw my first episode of Dr. Who last night on the Sci-Fi channel. I had heard about it years ago, but had never encountered it. Dr. Who, his young female traveling companion and a tag-along boy visited a space station where all the people had chips implanted and no longer asked questions. They were content doing their jobs thinking they had all the information they needed and that questions were pointless. You can imagine the effect Dr. Who had on this environment or else you can remember it clearly.

We look around our own world and wonder why more people don't ask more questions. We can look in the mirror and ask the same question. Where do questions come from? Do we manufacture them, too? Are they genetically passed on? Memetically passed on?

This week a dear friend informed me of her father's death after a lengthy battle with cancer. The same day another dear friend invited me to her husband's 80 birthday party 2000 miles away. The next day I got a postcard ad from Playboy: 12 issues for $12 and bonus DVD upon receipt of payment. That evening: two phone calls asking for money, my alma mater and the Cancer Society. How to respond to such diverse incoming information? Could the same filter handle the lot? Evidently not. It seemed that I had different compartments for each piece of input. I went to very different places in my body/mind memories to react and then to respond.

How would you react and then respond to inputs like these? What do you imagine my responses were? Are they the responses you would secretly like to make, but don't feel able to? Do you have more than one filtering mechanism, too? My future may take on a surprisingly different trajectory because of my responses. Could I have responded any differently? Are our reactions and responses already so built-in that we are not truly making a decision? I wonder. My dear friend with the birthday invitation was not at all surprised by my response. My wife seemed surprised by my response to the Playboy ad. And you?

The Possible World

You may have heard the joke about the two caterpillars looking up at a butterfly and one caterpillar says to the other, "you wouldn't catch me dead in one of those contraptions."

I was just reviewing Mae-Wan Ho's book, "The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms," looking for the phrase and idea of imaginal cells. I had first encountered this idea at a Jean Houston gathering of the West Coast Mystery School a few years ago and it resonated deeply. Imaginal cells are now almost mainstream with over 10,000 hits at google; however, I could not quickly find a first entry of the phrase into the lexicon.

If you aren't familiar with imaginal cells, they have to do with making butterflies and other organisms. You can jump to http://www.wisdomways.net/AboutUs/ButterflyStory.asp and read a great entry and/or just read on.

In the regenerating process a caterpillar is all about consuming. Looking at our present world, we seem to be mimicking the caterpillar. Well, as the story goes, the caterpillar finally senses that it is time to hibernate and it builds a cocoon around itself. Unlike bears in hibernation, the caterpillar appears to die or turn to mush, but on an unseen level, its liquid crystalline structure remains coherent (alive) and within that structured mush can be found imaginal cells resonating at a frequency that allows them to be attracted to each other, and within those cells is the blueprint image (liquid crystalline memory) of a butterfly. They proceed to use the mushy resources to build it. So the caterpillar in the joke above was actually correct, he was never dead, just transformed.

Thousands of people around the world have awakened to the fact that they and/or the organizations of which they are a part, are imaginal cells resonating at a frequency that is attracting them to each other for the transformative work of building the Possible World, the Butterfly World, populated with the Possible Humans and cooperative structures that can only be called Beautiful.

How is it that a seed idea from a natural phenomenon can blossom into this grand awakening in such a short time? Or was the awakening already taking place globally at an observational level or an intuitive level among a few folk? Many say yes. And into that sense of awakening drops a metaphor that paints the process in such a simple language that all those who are awakening can understand it. The power of the metaphor, the mythic story, the parable that speaks simply and in physical terms of a mental/spiritual/societal application that resonates with the ones that have started to awaken.

Biblically, you can read "awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light" (Eph 5:14). Sounds like he's talking to a caterpillar. The caterpillar thinks he's sleeping, but he looks dead. He just needs his imaginal cells to wake up and build that butterfly so that the regenerating process brings him into the light again. But Paul was probably not talking to caterpillars. Many, many cultures had the same story with slightly different words. The dream of a better world, a possible world, seemed to be part of the basic fabric of societies.

Many think the time has finally come for the big transition, Jump Time, the Great Turning, the wake-up call so we won't sleep through this coming rEvolution. Martin Luther King Jr was concerned in 1968 that too many people might sleep through the great rEvolution of the Civil Rights Movement. He used the story of Rip van Winkle who went to sleep under the rule of King George of England and woke up under the rule of George Washington.

It is time to open our senses to those people and groups that resonate with this image of the Possible World. There are thousands of websites, organizations, bloggers, and individuals that are ready to interact with you, dialogue with you, support you and your project to help bring into being this Possible World. There is no hierarchy. Each has the same image when all the outside trappings are laid aside. The same key words of cooperation, respect, coherence, self-renewing, regenerating, and interdependence keep showing up along with dozens of more.

It is time, high time, to wake out of sleep, again. "But will they wake, for pity's sake."

Meme Wars

I had never heard of the word meme before a bus ride to the Wakonse Institute in May of 2000. In conversation with an architecture professor from the University of Missouri, he suggested I read the book "The Evolving Self" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He couldn't pronouce his name either.

In reading the book that summer, I learned that memes are "any permanent pattern of matter or information produced by an act of human intentionality." The term was created by the British biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, who used it to describe "a unit of cultural information comparable in its effects on society to those of the chemically coded instructions contained in the gene on the human organism." Memes are analogous to genes. Memes are mentally passed on; genes are physically passed on. Memes combine and evolve; genes combine and evolve.

"At the moment of its creation, the meme is part of a conscious process directed by human intentionality. But immediately after a meme has come into existence, it begins to react with and transform the consciousness of its creator, and that of other human beings who come into contact with it." The author goes on to give a profound warning: "It is possible that one of the most dangerous illusions we must learn to see through is the belief that the thoughts we think of and the things we make are under our control, that we can manipulate them at will."

Whoa now! Wait a minute! Is he saying we have no control over our thoughts or the products we make from our ideas? He is saying we don't have as much control as we'd like to think. Even the idea that "I am in control of my thoughts" is a meme that came into our mind at some time. It started competing with other thoughts that doubted our ability to control our thoughts. The war was on!

Let's take an idea like "God loves me." We may have been taught that in Sunday school or Sabbath school or from someone attempting to help us feel better about ourselves. Then something "bad" happens to us and we have the thought "God doesn't love me anymore." These are two competing memes that may battle for superiority the rest of our lives. Whichever phrase is most successful at the time will convince us it is right. Whichever phrase we are believing at the time will govern other thoughts and actions which will seem to support the phrase we are believing until the circumstances change enough for the opposing phrase to rise to power.

"I can." "I can't." "I can." "I can't" We may "hear" those two arguing day in and day out, year after year. They are memes at war.

Dr. Don Beck, his mentor and associates have taken the term meme and expanded its application to help understand cultural movements throughout human history. In "Spiral Dynamics" memes are grouped into "Value Meme Codes" that are determined by the life conditions people experience. As life conditions change, the Value Meme Codes change, moving up and down a spiral of evolution. These are not changes in the genetics of people, they are changes in the memetics of people. Memetics is the science of ideas, cultural information passed on from mind to mind.

When we look at conflicting cultures we find that the conflicts are not genetic, they are memetic. There are meme wars going on around the world, memes competing with memes. Most of us think people were fighting people, but why do people fight? Because their ideas conflict. That conflict of memes can be within one mind as I described earlier or two minds in a relationship or small groups or nations. The meme of Christianity conflicts with the meme of Islam. The meme of capitalism conflicts with the meme of socialism. The meme of being an American may conflict with the meme of being a Russian.

A huge mistake we make is to take these conflicts personally. We confuse memes with people. We identify ourselves by our memes. I am an American or I am Italian. We identify others by their memes. They are Republicans or they are Democrats. We think people are against people, when all the time, it is simply memes and Value Meme Codes that are in conflict. When we learn to separate the person, the individual, from their memes, we stop judging the person. When we learn to separate our own memes from us, we stop judging (condemning) ourselves.

We will not have world peace until we learn to make this important separation between people and their memes, between people and the Value Meme Codes that life conditions have brought about within their lives. We can learn to respect the process of evolving ideas and values. We can help people emerge from life conditions that dictate survival values to life conditions that allow people to cooperate with and respect the interdependence of all the levels of creation.

If it is to be, it is up to US!

Welcome!

Whether we like it or not, whether we intend to or not, we are Co-Creating the Future with our every action, even every thought. That Future is not only our personal future, but the Future of our planet which impacts the Future of the Universe. Yes, "If it is to be, it is up to US!"

You may have heard that jingle stated, "If it is to be, it is up to me!" That's the way I first heard it in 1989 by a speaker at my school. After I thought about it and how interdependent we all are with everything, I was compelled to change that last word to "US." It has been my motto in my classroom ever since.

Is there one word in the phrase that stands out to you? I keep looking at the word "it." What is "it?" I think "it" refers to anything that has not yet happened. "It" could have a narrow, focused meaning like, "if this flat tire is going to get fixed, it is up to me and the kit someone sold me or me and the service station crew, or me and the tow truck driver." Or "it" could have a global meaning like world peace, which is up to all of US.

This idea may not be a news flash for you, but every time I stop and think through that idea, it hits me like a news flash. Is this thought or action what I truly want to contribute to the Future? Is this going to help the world in the short run? in the long run? Am I being part of the problem or part of the solution?

You may say "You think too much" and you wouldn't be the first, but what are our minds for, anyway? Why aren't we thinking all of the time except for non-dreaming sleep? Our minds are very powerful, mysterious instruments of such enormous complexity that our scientists are still trying to find the mind and discover how it works. They can measure brain waves and do pet scans revealing areas of activity, but to find a thought is not yet within their grasp.

One reason this phrase means so much to me is its ability to empower me, to remind me that I'm not just some totally insignificant mixture of dirt and water. We have all been moved, inspired, motivated, touched, hurt, scared, saddened, thrilled, excited, paralyzed, or tickled by thoughts, whether our own or someone else's. Those thoughts got to us through the spoken or written words and the actions of others. Thoughts are powerful.

So, this is an introduction to a conversation. I'm sharing thoughts with you that have come from all over the world and from the beginning of thoughts. I hope you will feel free to dialogue as we Co-Create the Future, one thought at a time.