How Do We Live The Future Now?
It's all in the glance, the stance and the dance.
What is really going on anyway? Have we moved beyond winning to win-win yet? How do we play an entirely different game? How step out of the old worldview and live in a completely new world?
The way I see it is that things are the way they are in the world because we humans create and maintain them that way with our thoughts, words and actions. To change the collective assumptions and institutions of this confused world you and I must wake up and change our individual minds and behaviors. How to do that?
In a world committed to greed, we can manifest generosity. In a world aflame with anger and hatred, we can manifest peace and love. In a world trapped in rigid ego identity, we can manifest an interdependent, fluid self. In a world caught in a reification of the current social structures, we can manifest the truth of continuous transformation.
In a world self-satisfied with material comfort and accomplishment, we can manifest awareness of suffering and its relief by letting go of endless desire. In a world committed to violence, we can manifest nonviolence. In a world intolerant of differences, we can manifest understanding and compassion.
In a world premised on might makes right, we can manifest humility and solidarity with the least, the lost and the last. In a world based on the repetition of lies, we can speak simply and factually. In a world ruled by wealth and power, we can celebrate sufficiency and cooperation. In a world built on nonrenewable resources, we can treat the Earth as sacred.
We can literally live this day in a different world, a world of the future, of the realization of sustainability, equality, justice, participation and tolerance. By embodying the values and behavior of this better world we literally bring it into the present milieu of crises and collapse. The presence and energy of this new world become a magnet for positive emotions and actions attracting around it greater and greater critical mass. As the old world implodes on itself what remains is the new cultural and institutional architecture of a compassionate civilization.
Could this be the way we get from here to there, by bringing there to here and then to now, living as if it were already accomplished, realized, made new? Let’s try it and see what happens.
And remember, it's all in the glance, the stance and the dance.