Search Results for: INSIDE THE INTELLIGENCE

Saving the World – Children are the future

By Kevin Karani

Today, we are halfway through the 21st century and I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. Yes, I literally cannot believe that I, along with many like-minded human beings from the Millennial age, not only saved the planet, its animals, and the human race on it, but we also made it a far better place to live than what it was back then. Today, in 2050, there’s ample food on everyone’s plate no matter where they live on the earth, a comfortable home to live in, good healthcare, and education as well. The nature is thriving as are the animals, there’s greenery all around, the air is clean, the sky is blue, and everyone is just happy and cooperative! But, how did we get here? Why do I say that I cannot believe the good world we are living in? Well, to know that, let me take you to the world that was back then first.

2024: I live in one of the most polluted cities in the world, Mumbai, in India. The human population has blown beyond the bottleneck in this region, majority of people have turned a blind eye towards the deteriorating climatic conditions, the increasing cruelty to animals, and the overall declining mental peace of themselves. Humans have become slaves to the consumerist lifestyle, leading them to live a selfish life without giving two hoots about the impact of their choices. The only hope in this almost dystopian human world is a group of few empathetic, calm-headed, forward-thinking, self-aware human beings realizing the need for action to change the way world thinks and works.

It’s time we stop thinking about short-term solutions that act just like instant relief medicines but do not treat the root cause. The root cause of everything wrong in this human-dominated world is the lack of empathy, kindness, and compassion. Humans have long forgotten their core trait of being human: the ability to feel empathy for others, the ability to be kind to every being, the ability to think consciously and choose, and the ability to be happy and cooperative.

The actual problem starts in childhood. Children are like learning machines (like artificial intelligence); what you feed them directly and indirectly is what they’ll grow into. The society slowly rubs off their core human traits of empathy, compassion, kindness, critical thinking, and conscious thinking ability by feeding them a consumerist mind-set that makes them selfish enough to not care about others. A lot begins at their food plate as well, where they start to disregard the lives of other sentient beings that are brought into existence, exploited, and killed just for their own consumption and benefits. This is where they start to devalue the resources they’ve been provided with and think that everything on this planet can be exploited for their benefit.

So what I’m doing today is educating the children and teenagers first. After all, the adults of today will not be the ones running the world in 2050, but it will be these children and teenagers of today (2024) who will run the world in 2050. I am adopting both approaches; top-down and bottom-up, to make sure that the young ones of today are more aware of what is happening in the world that doesn’t meet their eyes. They should know the impact of the choices they make today, which will determine how good or bad their future will be. I don’t want them to be another generation of short-term thinking human beings who know what they’ll get tomorrow but don’t know what will come the day after tomorrow.

Having a background in media and communication, I’m utilizing the network of people I have. I create awareness by taking informational sessions at schools and colleges that will make students aware of what’s happening and what will happen if they don’t change the way things are happening right now. I also partner with institutes to make audio-visual content with children for children. Here we break down complex terms, mythological stories, and deep issues into simple, understandable concepts with a quest to make them better human beings who make compassionate choices. This is a bottom-up approach to creating awareness at the grass root level. I’m also trying to work on a top-down approach where I find like-minded policy makers or myself become a policy maker to introduce policies, systems, and rules that will level-up the consciousness of children as well as adults and make them better, kinder, and more compassionate human beings.

It’s the year 2050.

The world is beautiful with happy, intelligent, and cooperative human beings! The journey to this day was not easy. In those days, a majority of my time went into doing the work that helped me earn money so that the survival of me and my family was assured, while I was also suffering from congenital heart disease, so taking care of my health was also important. But as you may know, when we work towards something with all our heart and mind, the universe also extends its hand to help us achieve it. On my journey, I found so many like-minded people from around the world with the same vision and the same vigour to change the way world works. They, too, were on a mission to save this world and make it a better place to live and thrive. One notable person who turned the spark inside me into flame was Suzanne Taylor, who was on a mission to shift mass consciousness so we-the-people create a world where we care about each other as much as we care about ourselves. Special thanks to Dr. Sailesh Rao for enlightening me about that special essay writing contest by Suzanne, where we threw ideas to save the world that led us to the world we are in today. It perfectly aligned with my long-term vision and helped me write down the things I wanted, and create a road-map. Since that special Valentine day of 2024, I, along with Suzanne, Dr. Sailesh, and many such like-minded people from around the world, set-off the butterfly effect that changed the world forever.

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. — Steve Jobs

THE GLOBAL GENOME PROJECT: Framework for Distributed, Coordinated Social Change

By Zann Gill

In 2024 many people realized that “effective optimism” must first call out, and counter, dark forces that stand in the way of civilization thriving and nature evolving with the innovative brilliance that created life on Earth.

The February 1, 2001 publication of the Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome, Nature 409, 860–921, with its many co-authors, inspired the idea that a Global Genome Project should explore how experts and experiencers in a broad range of disciplines, and with a broad range of experiences, can share their findings and observations toward emergent, cross-disciplinary collaborative intelligence to save civilization and life on this planet.

The Global Genome Project was proposed as a strategic first step toward seeding a network that can grow to combat dark forces that target scapegoats and create bandwagons used by profiteers to control and manipulate humanity. A scapegoat is someone turned into an “outsider” through manipulation of public opinion. A bandwagon is a clan of “insiders” – buyers, voters, promoters – created through manipulation of public opinion such that those on the bandwagon accept a product or candidate or opinion without asking questions or thinking critically.

To say that climate change scientists scapegoated by supporters of the fossil fuels industry are like abolitionists scapegoated by slaveholding profiteers demands unpacking this analogy from diverse professional perspectives to show how scapegoating obstructs critical thinking and erodes freedom of speech and democracy. Let’s start first with these nine domains:

Learning from History – Freedom of Inquiry and Freedom of Speech

As diverse as these domains appear on first glance, all have been inhibited by the manipulation of public opinion (scapegoats and bandwagons) and the lack of a vehicle to harness the diverse collaborative intelligence of many unique individuals.

The aha! of 2024 was the realization that Suzanne Taylor’s essay competition could become what Buckminster Fuller called a “trim tab”:

“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth again: The whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. It takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole ship of state is going to turn around. So I said, ‘Call me Trim Tab.’” (February 1972 interview, Playboy)

This essay aims to serve as a trim tab, proposing a framework into which diverse experts and experiencers can contribute their findings and observations t(both success stories and issue reports) toward an emergent Global Genome Project. I briefly summarize nine proposed starting domains below:

Democracy, Policy and its Impact on Global Challenges

Al Gore 2024 overview

Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose

Security: National, Local, Personal.

Japan

Tasmania

United States military budget

Climate Change Science: Using Data Analytics to Predict Trends

On January 25, 2024 Diane Bernard’s story recounted the more-than-a-decade long struggle of climate change scientist Professor Michael E. Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor, University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Center for Science and Sustainability, known for his work on the hockey stick graph of global temperature change. Michael Mann’s books hold the fossil fuels industry responsible for climate change threats to humanity and to all life on Earth.

Conservative writers supporting Big Oil targeted Michael Mann and compared him to a child molester. Such scapegoating threatened to make other climate scientists afraid to publish their work. On February 8, 2024 Michael Mann won a million dollar+ verdict in that lawsuit, a victory not only for climate change scientists but also toward making scapegoating unacceptable in scientific debates and reporting. That day journalist J.A. Ginsburg noted that the CO2 reading at Mauna Loa soared past 425 ppm, recalling her analogy: “Michael Mann is the next Rachel Carson.”

Filing a lawsuit should not be the only way to get such matters addressed. Lawsuits demand time and resources that most climate scientists don’t have.

The Global Genome Project will block bots and hackers from filing fake reports or manipulating the rating system and be able to detect patterns emerging by gathering reports from both experts and experiencers, with a content filtering system that allows reports most valued (read, commented on, acted on, shared) to rise.

Scientific Integrity – Freedom of Speech in Science

is more broadly impacted by scapegoating, and other forms of retribution, which can not only impact scientific method but also destroy freedom of speech, a prerequisite for democracy.

The Monsanto class action lawsuit for damages from the cancer-causing herbicide Roundup (first released in 1974) exposed how Monsanto scientists were routinely fired if they didn’t provide what Monsanto wanted – scientific confirmation that Roundup was “perfectly safe.” Monsanto closed in 2018 (taken over by Bayer) because of what this lawsuit exposed. The fact that this trial did not start until more than forty years after the release of Roundup, shows the power of industry and the inability of unconnected individuals to launch collaborative action. That class action lawsuits organized by lawyers are the only vehicle for redress shows the need for a public reporting platform. Filing a lawsuit should not be the only option. A lawsuit requires time and resources that most individuals don’t have. The Global Genome Project aims to provide an easier way to collect and organize many diverse individual experiences such that complementarities can emerge, enabling us to detect patterns (both positive and negative) sooner and to respond faster to early warning signals.

Legal Precedent.

writing on law vs fear

first

article

Those initiating the Global Genome Project recognized that in our current culture we assume that opposition (whether brute force fights or lawsuits) is our only problem-solving option, which highlights the great need for a vehicle to collect adjacencies and analogies in order to track and monitor emergent patterns over time so that we can initiate non-oppositional approaches to problem-solving.

The Arts (Film, Music, Visual, Writing) and Innovation

Nate Parker, 2016 Sundance Award Winner

David Oyelowo, who played Martin Luther King in SELMA, committed to work with Nate Parker

to rehabilitate his reputation as one of this generation’s most talented filmmakers.

Diverse scapegoating instances, from Michael Mann (climate change researcher) to Nate Parker (filmmaker), show how ad hominem attacks can be used to block messages from being heard. They can go further to damage the entire career of an individual motivated to act as a change agent in a domain where those in power do not want change.

Artificial Intelligence Advances became a Wakeup Call

collaborative intelligence

, the collaboration of humans and A.I. in a continual feedback loop such that A.I. makes no decisions without humans in the loop.

But A.I. can also be a tool for scapegoating. Lizzie Wolkovich’s manuscript was rejected by Nature because one human reviewer said, “It appears that ChatGPT wrote this manuscript.” ChatGPT offers an easy way to accuse a scientist of scientific fraud and a hard-to-refute tool for scapegoating. Despite proving that her paper was not written by ChatGPT, Wolkovich’s reputation was tarnished and Nature rejected her paper.

Equity – Hearing Diverse Voices

Edward Bernays, who launched his career rallying American public opinion behind entering World War I., in 1928 shifted to apply his “art of propaganda” and he became known as the “father of modern public relations.” Bernays was retained by the American Tobacco Company to convince women to smoke. Vera Sharav, Holocaust survivor, recalls the backstory of the recent film, “Thank you for smoking.” Bernays, a mind control expert, exploited women’s memories of the suffrage movement, cleverly choosing equality as the basis for his campaign of deceit. He convinced ten fashionable women, including his own secretary, that they were “lighting torches of freedom” toward improving the status of women by smoking as they marched down Fifth Avenue in the 1929 Easter Day parade. They lit up cigarettes as a symbol of their liberation.

This story made the front page of the NY Times, persuading many other women to take up smoking, to the detriment of their health and the benefit of Bernays’ client, American Tobacco Company.

December 6, 2023 marked the Centenary of the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) with little fanfare. ERA has still not passed one hundred years later. In the United States under President Biden, women raise 2.2% of funding, while men raise 97.8%. Either men are 48+ times smarter and more capable than women, or something is wrong.

Many women have experienced career setbacks where a single man could block a woman from getting her Ph.D., block her book or paper from being published, block her from being credited for her work. And yet in 2024 it remained extremely difficult to pool these experiences to see patterns and to enable collaborative action. Women in 2024 were given no other option than to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit in isolation, which most cannot afford, and they are stigmatized if they do so. The backlash for exposing means that most women do not expose.

Learning from History – Freedom of Inquiry | Freedom of Speech

By 2024 mob violence and polarization had reached such extremes that the election of 2024 was compared to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, prompting many to wonder whether the U.S. was heading toward another civil war.

Historical comparisons show that profiteers use similar scapegoating techniques in varied domains, from the fossil fuels industry to the slave trade. There are striking parallels between the scapegoating of abolitionist editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1830s) and other instances of scapegoating. In the case of Lovejoy, slaveholding profiteers targeted Lovejoy as their scapegoat to make all other abolitionists afraid to speak out. Events of 1836 – 1838 illustrate scapegoating techniques similar to those used today.

These events launched Abraham Lincoln’s path to the White House. On a cold winter day in Illinois, January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln delivered his first major public speech, known as his Lyceum Address. In this speech Lincoln’s ability to predict went beyond seeing ominous signs of Civil War to uncannily forewarning humanity of the threats of 2024.

Two recent murders inspired Lincoln’s speech, both committed by angry mobs of white men. The first was the lynching of Francis McIntosh, a free black man who had committed no crime before he was attacked, first by an angry policeman, then by a mob in St. Louis in 1836. The second was the murder of a white newspaper editor, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, who spoke out, deploring the heinous murder of Francis McIntosh. A mob of white men donned top hats and swallow tail coats to feign respectability when they murdered Lovejoy on November 7, 1837 in Alton, Illinois (Lincoln’s home state, supposedly a free state) across the river from St. Louis.

These two scapegoats, first a black man, whose murder triggered the second murder of a white man, moved Lincoln to wonder how he could address the evil of slavery and showed that even a white man who spoke out against slavery paid with his life, which meant that debate, the foundation of democracy, was itself at risk. Twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln in his Lyceum Address asked his audience:

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times.

Lincoln’s omen then has reared its ugly head again. The January 6, 2021 Attack on the Capitol was compared by Congressman Jamie Raskin to the mob attack on The Alton Observer when Elijah Parish Lovejoy was murdered.

Propaganda Bandwagons vs. Individual Critical Thinking
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark noted that “if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, . . . we’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

Successful advertising creates a bandwagon effect to make a brand or actor or candidate popular. Sometimes a bandwagon, a great surge of support, is a powerful way to draw attention to the need for action, whether to address climate change or to value the “black lives matter” movement.

Parallel techniques of mind control have been observed across many domains, whether profiteers scapegoat an abolitionist, or Nazis scapegoat Jews, or Big Oil advocates scapegoat climate change scientists, or the chemical industry scapegoats Rachel Carson and others who expose pollution, or ocean profiteers do not scapegoat, but ignore, oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, or women who expose abuse experience a backlash and become scapegoats. Those who profit typically start by ignoring. Later they move on to scapegoat when they can no longer ignore someone who points out that change is needed in a domain where they are reaping profits.

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1967), Buckminster Fuller applied his metaphor of Great Pirates to those leading corporations and governments who amass power through a “divide and conquer” strategy where increasing specialization is used to control and exploit the masses. Circumscribed knowledge, affording the comforts of being expert in a small domain, make people acquiesce in their subservience, almost without realizing. Fuller saw specialization, and lack of cross-fertilization, as weakening, not only every individual, but also the fabric of society.

The problem is bigger and broader than Fuller’s insightful metaphor. Restricting climate change scientists to work only with other climate change scientists, or women to work only with other women to improve the status of women, makes it unlikely that there will ever be sufficient critical mass to counter the powerful forces resisting change. Alignments can be created by the Global Genome Project.

Learning from Past Models

In 1961 R. Buckminster Fuller conceived the concept of World Game, a powerful vehicle to teach critical thinking and raise awareness of global co-dependencies.

World Game was typically played then by several hundred college students in a university gymnasium. The concept anticipated the Internet because it needed a persistent global online environment and technology that we now have to realize its full potential as a distributed global problem-solving tool. After Buckminster Fuller’s death in 1983, the World Game concept retained some adherents but generally lay fallow, awaiting a comeback that started in 2024.

An early seed of the Global Genome Project was inspired by World Game, expanding on the work of Zann Gill on earthDECKS where DECKS is an acronym for Distributed Evolving Collaborative Knowledge System and also evokes a DECK of story cards collected by means of the Global Genome Project platform. earthDECKS reporting, and work with The Ocean Foundation on ocean plastic, clarified the need to move beyond a single problem focus to tap the emergent power of collaborative intelligence in a cross-disciplinary, cross-problem network. GGP Reporting grew and evolved from 2025 – 2050, stimulating new learning by integrating the best of human contact and personalization with the potential for global sharing online. Lifelong learning and “learning by doing” evolved beyond being catchy phrases to drive a global World Game platform, harnessing the old dictum of E.F. Schumacher to “think global” | “act local.”

The distinction between collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence is that collective intelligence pools “the wisdom of a crowd of anonymous responders” to come up with a typically better-than-average consensus result. The key word here is consensus. In contrast, collaborative intelligence advances as natural evolution advances, acknowledging the uniqueness of all players in a non-anonymous, non-consensus-seeking ecosystem, such that of many experiments, those with most impact rise to exert more influence in the ecosystem. Collaborative intelligence preserves diversity (a distributed network of non-anonymous contributors) as synergies and unpredicted serendipities emerge.

The Global Genome Project saw a shortcoming in our common assumption that “we must have consensus” to begin, an assumption that explains our delayed climate change response. As psychologist Irving Janis noted, consensus-seeking behavior causes groups to sink to lowest-common-denominator results. None of the models below was broad enough or powerful enough:

The Better Business Bureau offers a simple model where individuals can, at no cost, file an online complaint in about 15 minutes against a business for defective products or services. Since most businesses don’t want a negative story online, some restitution occurs. But this program is limited to individuals with complaints against businesses, and businesses that decide voluntarily to respond. BBB specifically excludes gender issues and is not a powerful enough model to tackle the interrelated challenges that humanity faces.

GROUPON illustrates one way to pool individual bargaining power for lower prices.

VAERS is a voluntary Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. However, in the 1980s vaccine manufacturers negotiated from the U.S. government immunity from liability for adverse effects from any product called a “vaccine.” So VAERS performs no service for individuals reporting because individuals who believe a vaccine caused their medical condition have no claim, unlike the users of Roundup, which was not exempt, but for which there was no reporting system.

Workers’ Unions are one collective bargaining model with a long, complex history. Some have been highly effective in bargaining for their workers in a particular industry, but each union is limited in its scope and membership.

The Global Genome Project sought models that do not require consensus, recognizing that consensus-seeking collective models are inadequate for the grand challenges we face. GGP sought to develop a model based on collaborative intelligence. One possibility was to extend the principles of some online markets.

Professor Alvin Roth, Stanford Nobel Laureate solved a complex online market problem by developing an online market for kidney donor-recipient exchange.

Each kidney donor has unique requirements, as does each kidney recipient. The logistics of matching and of rapid donor-recipient exchange are critical.

Professor Jason Hartline, computer scientist working on peer review systems, is exploring how LLMs (A.I. Large Language Models) perform in scoring natural language comments made by human peer reviewers of each other’s work. Can LLMs improve the peer review process to make it fairer? He assesses LLM performance using the performance of multiple human reviewers as one way to improve LLM performance.

The questions asked in 2024 were: How could the online market for kidney donors-recipients be extended to a broader online market of content contributors-content recipients? And how could the online market for peer review be used to rate content in such a system? How could such scoring also address questions such as those raised by the Lizzie Wolkowich story above? And how can these precedents be extended to a more complex ecosystem of contributor-user exchange with peer review commenting?

Finally, how can a range of individuals (academics, artificial intelligence commenters, activists, asylum-seekers, biodiversity experts, blacks, children, climate change professionals, disabled, doctors, elders, environmental scientists, immigrants, injured, Muslims, indigenous people, oceanographers, scapegoats, scientists, soil regeneration experts, students, women, and many more) report (both positive and negative) and look for others with complementary expertise or experiences to initiate, not just one-to-one, but potentially one-to-several or one-to-many unique exchanges? The mix of category types in the example above is intentional. Each is a tag, and each individual, incident or content item can have many tags, e.g. Lizzie Wolkowich belongs to multiple categories: academic, artificial intelligence commenter, environmental scientist, scapegoat, woman. Searching one tag should pull up her experience and show how it is connected by its tags to many other experiences, people, resources, and opportunities in an ecosystem where keyword tags are complemented by timestamps, geo-location and affiliation tags.

The Global Genome Project decided in 2024 to extend these models via GAIL [Global Action Improv Lab], acknowledging that we will only learn by improvising, that we must keep trying new experiments, and that we must acknowledge the unpredictability of each experiment.

What neXt?

The Global Genome Project (GGP) launched the neXt forum in 2024 to convene those concerned about the great challenges humanity faces. The great wakeup of 2024 harnessed “effective optimism” to identify dark forces and support empowerment of many individuals through the collaborative intelligence platform that GGP committed to build. The large objective was to remediate or avert the Tragedy of the Commons (Garrett Hardin 1968), ultimately benefitting everyone.

The Global Genome Project launched GGP Reporting to gather through its online platform both positive progress stories and issues from diverse experts and experiencers, enabling those looking for precedents (both positive and negative) not only to “zoom out” from individual expertise or experience to see a metaview of connections, but also to bring thought leaders with diverse expertise and experiences into a collaborative intelligence network to co-support each other toward achieving critical mass to address our challenges from 2025 to 2050.

The Global Genome Project noted that if U.S. legislators can pass a vaccine mandate “for public safety,” then they can pass gun control laws “for public safety” and they can address many of the challenges above “for public safety.”

But the Global Genome Project also realized that our problems are rooted in “idealism capitalism,” which celebrates capitalism as empowering the individual, an ideology that is no longer true. When corporations were granted personhood, capitalism stopped celebrating human individuals, who were turned into consumers and disempowered by corporate personhood entities.

The Global Genome Project aimed to restore the original idealistic values of capitalism by empowering individuals within online markets with appropriate safeguards. A campaign was launched to

– remove corporate personhood;

– make campaign donations to politicians transparent; and to

– empower the Global Genome Project to work effectively with, but not “inside,” any national government because saving our planet is for everyone.

2024 was the year that the Global Genome Project, in collaboration with GAIL [Global Action Improv Lab], and other organizations, launched a 21st century re•vision of World Game, which started first with GGP Reporting, gathering reports from a global distributed network, sharing reports of successes and problems, to grow a knowledge-sharing network. Many joined forces to end scapegoating and cancel culture and to restrict the use of bandwagons such that advertising dollars spent on bandwagon building must be transparent. The aha! that effective optimism must first face dark forces brought three related insights.

First, the mission of starting and growing a Global Genome Project network led to asking, “How can we grow our capacities as critical thinkers so that people of all ages are not so easily bamboozled, so we are all thinking for ourselves?

Second, the potential for broadly accessible A.I. tools can both provide a mirror to reflect on existing human weaknesses and also offer potential to support collaborative intelligence of humans and A.I. agents. Though A.I. can be abused, it can also be used to support those committed to constructive change.

Third, by moving beyond the “correct vs. incorrect” mindset, we can stop censorship battles and restore books to libraries. We can stop believing that those in power have “correct information” and should choose the “correct narrative” and decide what constitutes “misinformation.”

The Global Genome Project started by identifying individuals aligned with its mission, focusing first on domains with sufficient critical mass to launch, later adding new domains and challenges such that each could support others. By 2050 GGP served an ecosystem of diverse voices, enabling decision-making to focus first on issues, not candidates. Exploitation and abuse could be so rapidly called out and addressed that issues were not time-wasters. Stories of progress became models, easily translated and adapted for other contexts. Everyone celebrated that a bygone “Dark Age” had inspired a growing, evolving learning network, continually discovering new alignments and creating new alliances.

The 2050 Chronicles

By Rose Diamond

The 2050 Chronicles

Rose Diamond

It’s 2050 and I am called to bear witness to how we humans survived the madness of the first quarter of this century.

I will not revisit the events of 2025, there are others better suited to that task and, while it is important to remember the suffering visited upon so many, those of us who survived prefer to think of the event as a Great Liberation rather than a great cataclysm. Part of the social contract that now knits us together into One Community is that we choose to remember the distorted thinking that caused so much death and misery so that we may never go back there, and at the same time we refrain from dwelling on the old stories of division, lack and self-interest; we are united now in living a new story.

An important part of our new story is that every individual counts – the choices we make, the actions we take, the thoughts we have, the ways we treat each other – a myriad of small conscious choices made every day by millions of individuals form the foundation of our new world. We are each a cell in the body of humanity and in the body of the world and we can choose to be vibrant cells supporting the liveliness of the whole. We recognise that each individual is an ordinary expression of a shared humanity and, at the same time, has extraordinary potential to create, inspire and encourage. In that spirit I will tell you about the small but vital part I have played in our recent transformation.

I live in the land we used to call the United Kingdom. Those of us who survived dwell around the coastal edges, the centre is as yet uninhabitable, and our numbers are relatively small. We live as locally-based and globally connected, technically enhanced hunter-gatherers. It’s remarkable how quickly life returned to the seas once we stopped using nature as a resource to be exploited, and now we take only as much fish as we can use. We grow all our crops, fruit and vegetables, using greenhouses and hydroponic farming, alongside community farms and gardens. There is more than enough food for everyone. The sea, the wind and the sun give us all the energy we need to power our homes and enterprise hubs. We connect all around the world using the latest technologies which are constantly being enhanced. Now that we are released from dualistic and limited thinking it is very exciting how we can all think together and very quickly evolve solutions to any problem. We meet in local and regional councils across the generations, races and religions; anyone who is interested in a particular aspect of our community life has a voice and we have evolved methods of conversation that draw the best from everyone so that we can weave ideas into solutions and move quickly into creative experimentation. Together, we give rise to a great joy knowing that this is how human life was meant to be and we are now truly living in a way that makes us proud to be human, taking care of life on Earth and each other. This is the Great Liberation.

If you are wondering how this consciousness and culture shift happened I can only tell you that the events that unfolded in 2025 created such a seismic shock a collective awakening was evoked. This could only happen because there were enough of us who had been preparing the way and were holding the space for such an emergence. When I look back I realise the biggest gift I brought was listening. There can be no co-operation with anyone or anything if we don’t listen, and that includes listening to our inner authentic truth, to each other, to nature and to the evolutionary impulse.

First I need to give you a bit of context. I am of the generation we called the baby boomers who came into life after the previous great cataclysm, the second world war. We were a generation fired with a vision and a mission. (Later generations had their visions and missions too and I will let them tell those.) Some of us came to Earth at this time to be midwives for the Great Liberation and, for me, it took the best part of a lifetime to remember this mission, step into it fully and embody it. It was a path of remembering who we truly are and fully connecting with that truth through a spiritual quest and a path of conscious healing. Each of us had to find the motivation for that journey inside ourselves and then we were carried on the waves of our collective awakening.

There is so much I could tell you but in the interests of brevity I will concentrate on just five crucial strands of my life story where I participated and made a contribution to a new co-operative culture.

Humming the World Awake

Identifying with a Counter-Cultural Movement and the Heroic Journey of Liberation

I came into young womanhood as the second wave of the Women’s Liberation Movement was breaking on our shores in the early 1970’s. This counter-cultural movement arose spontaneously from the collective consciousness and opened many doors in my mind, enabling me to discover and follow my destiny.

Growing up in a family in which my father dominated my mother I was already predisposed to the work of women’s liberation. From the moment I read my first feminist book, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, I was awake with excitement and throughout my life I chose to follow that intense whole-body-whole-mind creative impulse whenever it arose.

The Women’s Liberation Movement, like any other counter-cultural movement, was based on shared understandings a) that our current mindset and sense of identity were the products of centuries of oppression through which we had been conditioned into limited ways of knowing ourselves and the world and b) that liberation from oppression is a collective endeavour. Our mantra was “the personal is political” and our basic tool for making the connection between the personal and the political was the consciousness-raising group. Coming together in local groups and national conferences we’d sit together in circles and explore our experiences as women and then, emboldened by the sharing, we’d take actions for change. This simple formula of first becoming more aware of our experience, finding strength in a collective practice, and then taking action, is one I have continued to nurture and encourage throughout my life. Back then, some of the actions I took included participating in the early days of creating refuges for women and children suffering from domestic abuse. I was a member of a women’s writing group for several years and we published our own poetry. I initiated a collaborative project, Women Start Here, creating a guidebook and collection of case studies which encouraged group leaders in local communities to bring women together in informal learning groups, in particular those living in peripheral housing schemes. I was then commissioned by a community organisation to undertake research into women’s unemployment and was shocked to discover the collusion of government agencies to cover up the truth about the extent of women’s exclusion from the workforce. As a result of my research a training centre upskilling women in technology skills was opened in Edinburgh. I also ran my own groups and workshops exploring themes of women and the creative process and I wrote the first draft of a book on this subject.

What was most exciting to me were the books by feminist writers I feasted on for twenty-five years. They were unashamedly breaking new ground by leaving old stereotypes behind and stepping into being a whole new kind of woman – unadorned, radical, intellectually brilliant and challenging. Over the years, the themes evolved from outrage and social critique, to the roots of women’s psychology, to the suppression of soul and nature-based spirituality. Each deepening of theme revealed me to myself and helped me to understand, not only how women had been oppressed over the centuries, but how the process of colonisation works through the theft of land, language and spirituality. In this way I began to empathise with other oppressed and indigenous people’s throughout the world. This was an expansion of consciousness and a deepening of worldview which, in turn, led to an understanding of just how challenging and heroic is the human journey to liberate ourselves from the limiting conditioning so deeply etched into our minds and bodies.

The transition of humanity, from the old life-threatening cultural paradigm to a new life-affirming paradigm and culture, had begun and it provided a heady mix of new, life-changing ideas, radical commentary and experiments in living differently. Of course the Women’s Liberation Movement wasn’t the only counter-cultural movement – the Civil Rights Movement, the Campaign against Nuclear Disarmament, the Environmental Movement, Gay Rights, were just a few from those earlier years. And later we saw the Occupy Movement, Extinction Rebellion, the LBTGI community, Black Lives Matter, and the Me Too movement, to name a few. Those years, from the early 1970’s right through to the Great Liberation, which began in 2025, gave rise to an exhilarating explosion of creativity and new ways of thinking, seeded a new culture and pointed the way towards a better future, although amongst all the mayhem and political insanity it was often difficult to see how this evolution was manifesting on the ground

Our collective journey towards liberation, expanded consciousness, protest and creativity was thrilling and sometimes great fun, but it was not easy. By the early 1980’s it was becoming apparent to me and my feminist sisters that our consciousness raising groups, along with our growing cultural analysis, were not enough. Untamed ego was rampant within and between us and our energy became dissipated as we turned against each other, unable to accept our differences. We soon realized, if we wanted to change the world by raising our consciousness, we needed more tools and practices. Many of us began to seek out the diverse forms of psychotherapy and intense experiential learning groups suddenly available everywhere. A treasure trove of healing modalities and therapies appeared alongside spiritual practices and traditions. Some of these were ancient practices that had been well loved in the past and then repressed and forgotten, others evolved out of new psychological understandings. It was only when we started to use these tools to look inwards that we discovered just how deeply and tenaciously the old, life-denying culture had taken root inside us.

WritingPoetry as a Tool for Inner Transformation and Sacred Activism

The cultivation of co-operation is not only a social phenomenon; it begins inside each individual heart and develops through the transformation of consciousness, one person at a time.

It is essential that we learn to co-operate with the unfolding of the creative process as it touches and flows through us and with the evolutionary impulse which is always available to inform and guide us. This is the art of sacred activism which puts our whole state of being at the heart of all we do.

When I started to write poetry in my late 20’s I had no language for the inner world. If someone had asked me how I felt – and I don’t think anyone ever did – I would have struggled to put a sentence together. I was living from the surface of myself, driven by emotions and urges I did not understand or reflect upon. From my present-day perspective I would say I was unconscious – intellectually bright but lacking in the awareness and wisdom that enables any depth of self-reflection and deliberate choice. In other words, I wasn’t guiding and shaping my own destiny but simply reacting to whatever was put in front of me.

When I came out of an eight year relationship, and went to live for the first time alone in a rural cottage, I began to sit quietly in the living room after work, with a pen and notebook, and poems spontaneously started to flow through me. It was as if a lively stream of wisdom had been waiting for its time to be released so that it could ripple across the paper and show me who I really am.

The poems astonished me because I didn’t think them up, they simply showed up, fully formed. They spoke in a different voice to my everyday personality; an authoritative, authentic voice far wiser and more knowing than my personality. I was thrilled – and that is one of the primary characteristics of creating – excitement lifts me out of the mundane repetitions and frustrations of daily life into a transcendent realm which is always new, unexpected and surprising. Excitement is a mobilisation of energy which becomes a momentum the more I give it my attention. It wasn’t only the artefacts of the poems that delighted me – the fact that I had created something out of nothing, something that would last – it was the discovery of a whole new dimension of being I hadn’t previously known existed. When my inner world revealed itself in this way, I found an Aladdin’s cave; a magical, mystical world of endless riches and possibility. And this was very compelling.

This opening into my inner world made me more intelligent, capable and confident in the outer world too. I had been underachieving since the age of twelve. In the face of problems at home and tedium at school, my intelligence had gone underground, like a bulb patiently awaiting the right season to bloom. When the time was right, my petals effortlessly opened to reveal the poetry and magic hidden in my soul.

A deeper self was communicating with me through poetry, and the solitary, rural life I’d chosen gave me the space, stillness and silence in which I could concentrate on the practice of listening deeply. This came naturally to me, as if I was already skilled at it. As a personality I was frequently inarticulate, full of self-doubt, lacking in confidence and confused, yet the poet’s voice was strong, knowing, powerful and mature. Where was this voice coming from? How could these two totally different beings – the immature, unconscious personality and the wise, knowing author, inhabit one body?

A door had swung open into a whole new dimension of being. I was bowled over by awe and wonder and the activities of daily life paled in comparison. Later I came to understand this as an opening to the spiritual dimension within me through which my soul was emerging to be heard. Writing poetry enabled me to focus the intense energy of this spiritual awakening and became a boat to carry me through the turbulent seas of the following years.

Anyone who doubts that a poet can be a visionary, a seer, a prophet, or that poetry can originate from the place where the personal is political, should consider the lives of poets in Soviet Russia in the 1980’s. Just this week I came across a poem I wrote in the late 1980’s about the poet, Irina Ratushinskaya, who was arrested in September 1982 and sentenced to seven years hard labour for writing poetry and “being a danger to the State”. (Under Stalin’s despotic regime, between 1925 and 1941, other Soviet poets were persecuted – Sergei Yesenin hanged himself, Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself, Osip Mandelstam died in a prison camp, Isaak Babel was executed and Marina Tsvetayeva also hanged herself. In 1964 Joseph Brodsky was exiled for his “social parasitism” and “decadent poetry”. The celebrated Russian modernist poet Anna Akhmatova wrote a long poem, Requiem about the suffering of people under the Great Purge which was finally published in 1987, 40 years after she wrote it. Poets have been persecuted in other countries too such as the Spanish poet Frederick Garcia Lorca who was assassinated in 1936. And, according to a Guardian article written in 2021 similar persecution of poets was still happening, for example, in India, the author of a viral poem about Narendra Modi’s handling of Covid-19 has been demonised and” all around the world, from Myanmar to Belarus, poets are being persecuted”.)

The tragic truth is that to an authoritarian regime an authentic voice is threatening. For me, this puts into perspective the importance for each of us to develop our authentic voice and to speak our own deepest truths as the bedrock of true democracy. My own experience has shown me that the more I speak from this authentic place within me the more I bring forth transpersonal truths and when we come together for this purpose we are committing r/evolutionary acts.

Songs for Irene

February twilight,

alone in a caravan thrumming with raindrops

in a garden, on a hillside, in the western lowlands,

drawn to my ritual cave

for some ancient ceremony, feast or purification,

a rite that blood once sang,

forgot and returned to earth.

Now my dulled senses beckon and

I turn to listen.

In the city the festival of peace has started.

I cannot be there, having no vision

for a world, a people, a person

at peace for more than moments

that vision not yet born in me

but knowing we could feed, clothe, house and educate

all the people of this world

for a fraction of what we spend on killing.

We are all in crisis

We never really talk about what’s really going on

the invisible prison fence

the repetitions of old patterns

the safety of habit

the laws we did not make

the self-imposed torture

the scores of ways we numb ourselves

the treadmills of the patterns we can’t break

the maze we walk unsensed

the pressures we’re under

the deadlines

the holes in us

through which our love and beauty leak away.

Irena was imprisoned for being a poet

one of many poets tortured for her truth

arrested at twenty-eight and sentenced

to seven years of strict regime

and a further five of internal exile

they said she’d have her liberty at forty

then chose to release her at thirty-three.

They called it liberation.

When she scratched her poems on soap

committed her lines to heart to save her sanity

and when she walked the streets of an alien culture

was she free?

the poem is in the body

the poem is in the gut, blood, breath

the poem is an old woman

who has lived through many lifetimes

listen, her voice is cracked

she has waited, waited for her time

the poem is a gift and a burden

it is a song of freedom

a demanding teacher, a guide

the poem is eternal,

it is water, it is fire, it is rock.

Irene whose name means peace, was a celestial attendant to Aphrodite, goddess of love. She both announced the coming of death and acted as mid-wife to the gods.

Rose Diamond, 1987

Writing poetry led me to the understanding that the root of all oppression is the colonisation of soul. Feminist writers gave me a means to understand my own oppression as a woman and pointed the way to how I could liberate myself. Poetry gave me a tool through which I could listen deeply to my own inner experience, become an archaeologist of soul and connect with transpersonal truths. In the 1980’s I wrote a 60-page poem, A Poem for Voices, which led me on an inner archetypal journey of transformation, starting from a lonely state of alienation to being part of a group of 8 people sitting on a mountain top humming the new world awake. I invited four women actors to read the poem and we offered it to a full house at the Edinburgh playwright’s workshop. The practice of listening deeply to inner wisdom from a space of presence became a prime motivator and tool for my personal mission. The vision of a group of people summoning in a new world by humming returned to me at the darkest hour of our transformation in a way I will reveal later.

Stepping Up to the Work that Has My Name on it

Those of us in my generation who were on a conscious healing path were breaking new ground, turning up the soil of the soul, and laying new tracks, so that generations coming after us could move forward more easily. At the beginning this was mostly unconscious, it just seemed to arise spontaneously but over time as I understood my mission better my strategy was to learn everything I could from the inside out and then to pass on whatever I learned to others as quickly as possible. My roles as a teacher, and then later as a whole person educator and gestalt therapist, and a personal and professional development trainer, gave me the freedom to design my own educational programmes and to provide a theoretical framework of understanding alongside the facilitation of process, skills and creative empowerment.

A few years after I started writing poetry and began to experience the bliss of deep listening, I began to seize every opportunity I could to extend these skills with others. Backed by the Open University, I wrote a handbook and simple training course for group leaders called Listening Helps. And then I followed with another project designed to support group leaders to facilitate the shift from a competitive culture to a co-operative culture. I wrote training materials and ran trainings for leaders in community and health education and in the prison service. The project with prison officers was particularly interesting as the intention was to seed and grow a compassionate prison culture by training the officers in groupwork skills and giving them a safe forum in which they could explore their own experiences. It was very clear that many of the officers were as imprisoned by the punitive system as the inmates. Going into the prison at regular intervals reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus, in which a large boulder is rolled to the top of the hill, only to roll down again. Although some of the officers were able to seize the opportunity we offered, on the whole it was a constant process of starting over and pushing the boulder up the hill again. This caused me to realise the weight of the individual and institutional inertia we were up against.

We all have unique gifts to bring and when we bring them wholeheartedly our individual contributions add up to something bigger and more powerful. The practice of deep listening is one of the best gifts I bring and it became the key to everything that gave my life meaning.

I trained to be a gestalt therapist over ten years, and continued to practice and teach gestalt for many more years. It was here I first experienced the excitement of transformational process in an ongoing group and within an international community. At the time we thought our trainers were magicians who could draw out each individual’s deepest soul themes and then weave the threads into a fabulous group tapestry, which in turn was part of a bigger collective web of meaning. A conversation would start over here and end up over there and we never knew where we were going or how we got there. The basic underlying theory focuses on the ways we interrupt our contact with experience and how we can use the practices of presence, awareness, deep listening, the imagination and experimental action, to re-connect and co-operate in the unfolding of the creative process. These skills and understandings have stayed with me ever since and become the bedrock of the groupwork skills and personal practices I use today.

I had discovered the exhilaration of connecting with myself and with others and unfolding the creative process together through conversation. Throughout my life I continued to create spaces where these deep discovery conversations could be held. In the late ‘90’s I joined a community of 40 people in New Zealand, in a dialogue circle over 8 days, and again I was thrilled by the adventure of it. Afterwards I started to evolve my own way of holding such circles in my local community. I didn’t fully know what I was doing, how to put language to it, or how to facilitate the process, but people responded to my call and demonstrated a hunger for this adventure of speaking from the authentic self and discovering the truth of our deepest wisdom together. A few years later I found my soul mate and he shared this love so we had ten years of exploring our inner lives, resolving tensions in our relationship and, most importantly, c0-creating a vision for a whole new world. It became clear to me that if we want to create a new culture with a new story, each of us needs to live our passion and I wrote a book based on conversations with 20 ordinary-extraordinary people who were changing their local communities by being love-in-action. After that I went on to record 200 or so conversations with new culture makers. Making podcasts is very popular now but back then I was a pioneer.

When my soulmate died in 2015 I wrote my way through my grief by writing a handbook for Deep Discovery Conversations and these are now part of my current transformational offerings.

So when you ask me how I have contributed to co-creating a collaborative culture, one of my best contributions has been inviting people into spaces where we can explore and harvest together our common wisdom, the wisdom of the tribe. In our transition into new ways of living together these simple skills and practices become the hub around which we live and make us a connected culture, honouring diversity within unity, recognising each other’s contribution and always remembering that we need each other and we are more whole, well and powerful together than we could ever be alone.

Walking the Path of Conscious Healing: The Willingness to Descend into Inner Shadows, Endure Dark Nights of the Soul and Sit with Death.

Just one more thing. Another contribution I have made that has been very useful through these transitional times is to pass on to others what I have learned about moving consciously through grief and death to participate in the renewal of life. There was enormous grief in the loss of life around 2025, but when entered into consciously, shock, crisis and loss can be the very ground from which consciousness grows.

My conscious walk with death began in earnest when my soulmate died in 2015 and six months later my brother died suddenly too, leaving me the only remaining family member. I began an inquiry into death, grief and loss which lasted for seven years.

My personal sorrow morphed into a growing collective grief as we suffered the pandemic, the running down of the infrastructure of our country, the war on democracy, mass migrations in response to authoritarian regimes, senseless brutal wars and complacency in the face of the climate emergency and the extinction crisis. There was so much to grieve and yet the majority of people had never been given the space or encouragement to do so and any show of emotion was considered to be an indulgence. Using my own grieving process as the starting place to deepen my understanding, I took up the call to educate, encourage, empower and equip people to move through grief towards fulfilling participation in community life by creating a programme I called, Sitting with Death and Choosing Life, the cornerstone of which is deep listening. I didn’t set out to create a programme but it just kept coming through me until in the end I had created an eco-system of five courses, a library of resources including over 50 recorded conversations with diverse practitioners and eventually I completed my book, A Story of Transformation, How grieving my brother’s death brought gifts of healing and awakened me to our power to renew the world. I offered all of this as stimulus materials designed to help participants contact their own truth. The essential thing was the willingness to meet in circle and find the courage to put words to experiences which are often beyond words; and yet it is this attempt which helps us to touch our common humanity.

“My seven years of grief” carried me into my fourth life chapter of Eldership. Here is what I wrote in A Story of Transformation:

“Perhaps it is grief that expresses our human-ness more than any other experience. Only the human part of us dies. Spirit is eternal. Only the human in us experiences loss and separation. Spirit knows no separation. Perhaps the most vital work of the human project, and the grand design of Soul, is to bring the eternal spirit of wholeness and interconnectedness into our daily human lives and to embody it. Perhaps this shift into a compassionate identification with all that it means to be human is essential for the future survival and thriving of our world. The seven years of grief which began after my brother’s death was a rite of passage, a time when I was called to immerse myself fully in the experience of loss and grief and to face into the inevitability of death, not just for myself alone but as a way of contributing to the collective consciousness of humanity.”

This life chapter I’m calling Eldership is about completion, integration, coming to peace with life and being of service to the greater Whole. Earlier in life I was preoccupied with discovering who I am in relation to the society and culture in which I live. Then I was dedicated to remembering who I am as a spiritual being. And, in my fourth soul chapter of Eldership, I returned to an interest in what it means to be a human being, only now, with the understanding and awareness that I am a spiritual being having a human experience. The more consciously I can live this human experience the better I bring together the human and the spiritual within me and embody my soul.

Humming the World Awake

The story I’ve told you is a story of how evolution plays out through an individual and how our life purpose can unfold effortlessly, as our greatest adventure, if we let it.

I began as an unconscious young woman lucky to be born into a time of expansion and creativity. I allowed myself to be borne along by the energy of a counter-cultural movement and found an identity and purpose within it. I discovered a gift for deep listening which opened up all sorts of opportunities that brought me a great deal of joy and fulfilment – writing poetry, initiating deep discovery conversations, bringing people together for experiential learning and transformational practice, giving voice to all aspects of our humanity, deepening into soul and history. I became very excited by the prospect of a cultural transformation through the evolution of consciousness. At a certain point many of us believed a whole new world was inevitable and was just around the corner. And then the darkness deepened and the insanity in the world became more and more rampant and I began to think that the only way we would get through this was by divine intervention. And, because I had been delving so much into death, and so many of my loved ones were residing in another dimension, it dawned on me how much spiritual power surrounds our world – all of the enlightened great ones and the “ordinary” souls who worked for the good of the whole – are still here with us. The task of those of us who had agreed to midwife this Great Liberation was to connect with each other all around the Earth and with the spiritual energy surrounding the Earth where all our loved ones are cheering us on and lending their energy to the awakening. That’s when I came upon the idea of the Great Hum.

Soul has a resonance, a call, and that resonance, at its purest, is a call to life that can wake us into our next expansion of wholeness. What if, as a collective practice we came together and, with intention, started to hum, calling in all the spiritual energy that is here in all the dimensions of cosmos.

And so we did. And you may remember the old story of the walls of Jericho. Well it was like that. When the walls of the old authoritarian story came tumbling down we were ready, holding space for the new consciousness. And as people recovered from the shock this new consciousness was here, ready to welcome and hold them as they awakened.

We transformed from a fragmented world, held together by domination and threads of light, to a field of unified knowing in which the interconnectedness of all life within a purposeful cosmos, guides our every action. This is the foundation from which we now live. When you realise you are a soul here on Earth to have a human experience within an interconnected universe, nothing other than co-operation is possible. It is still possible to make mistakes and mess up but failures are seen as opportunities to increase skills, understanding and compassion. It’s a path of lifelong learning, creative empowerment and endless fulfilment. I am so privileged to have been part of it.

Thanks for listening,

Rose Diamond

February 14, 2024

Rose Diamond is author of the forthcoming book, A Story of Transformation, How grieving my brother’s death brought gifts of healing and awakened me to our power to renew our world. She has published three other books on various aspects of the transformational process and is the creator of the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme. She lives in Wales,UK, and you can find her here: https://sittingwithdeathandchoosinglife.com; www.tribeintransition.net

Communities of Action

By Bett Bollhoefer

I gaze upon a society of enlightened individuals on January 1st, 2050, as we collectively celebrate the new year and reflect on my role in bringing about this transformation.

Allow me to paint a picture of what I observe:

In Oakland, CA, I witness a population that is both physically and mentally actualized—strong, present, and prepared for the uncertainties of life. Each person optimizes their existence for joy, participating in thousands of action communities where members collaboratively engage in various projects. These communities yield a plethora of societal benefits, ranging from new art forms and technologies to research projects on rare diseases, innovative exercise routines, dances, and initiatives focused on preserving endangered animals.

Today, we come together to share and celebrate the outcomes of these action communities in 2049.

Among the achievements are three new musical instruments, seven new dances, ten novel types of physical exercises tailored for different maladies, fifteen protocols to prevent or reverse diseases, 200 fresh recipes, 500 new songs, and a staggering 10,000 new mentors graduating from their year of mentorship.

Booths representing these communities line the streets of downtown Oakland and the shores of Lake Merritt, inviting members and tourists alike to explore a multitude of innovations. This annual event draws thousands of visitors from China, India, and across North America.

Every street offers a feast for the senses, with new smells, textures, and colors captivating all who attend.

These innovations include blocks of new technologies—some designed to enhance the resource efficiency of homes, others focused on new energy sources, recycling methods, or novel ways to communicate and learn from one another.

“What did I do?” you inquire. Well, I continued to do what I’ve always done: instigate, connect, and create. In 2024, I published a manifesto titled “Communities Of Action (CoA) Principles,” outlining the 10 principles for the optimal functioning of such communities. The people of Oakland embraced the concept, particularly as the looming challenges of artificial intelligence necessitated a shift from traditional career-focused thinking.

In a society where one’s worth was traditionally tied to a paid career, my manifesto proposed a new perspective. Instead of solely pursuing financial profit, these projects could center around maximizing joy. Each person could join multiple action communities, contributing their unique skills and interests. The young and old alike could find purpose, community, and joy, simultaneously making the world a more joyful place.

Reflecting on it now, it seems obvious. Removing the profit-driven organization blinders revealed the incredible potential of an organization dedicated to a common purpose. An organization focused on joy-driven goals, as opposed to personal profit, brings a different energy, fostering innovation without the constraints of traditional profit-driven or non-profit structures.

Recognition abounds for each person’s contribution, providing the status they yearn for through efforts, skills, unique talents, and hard work. The culture of celebration proves more motivating than financial gain.

Post-manifesto, people gradually formed these Communities of Action as weekend volunteers. As AI shortened everyone’s workweek, they devoted more time to these communities. Eventually, when the US Government mandated a 20-hour workweek, everyone embraced these communities more fully while also spending increased quality time with family and friends.

As a result, individuals found meaning beyond their “day jobs.” Physical and mental health improved due to exercise, home-cooked meals, and the end of stress culture associated with lengthy work hours. The focus shifted to health and joy, away from boasting about long workweeks now deemed illegal.

New challenges emerged, and communities thrived around sports, exercises, hobbies, and adventures. Fun activities became avenues for learning and knowledge-sharing. The manifesto outlined basic structures for knowledge exchange, and over time, best practices evolved, leveraging AI to refine and disseminate knowledge globally.

Here we stand, in the first city to initiate the Communities of Action (CoA) trend. However, every city boasts its own action communities, and the world has united to share knowledge across borders and languages. Traveling to witness innovations, taste diverse cuisines, and experience dances has become a tradition, with at least one yearly trip to another city’s festivities.

The Manifesto, as shared in 2024:

“Communities Of Action (CoA) Principles” by Bett Bollhoefer

Communities of Action (CoA) help individuals develop into their most joyful selves by allowing them to find a role and grow into their fullest potential and mentoring others doing the same.

A CoA is a community somewhere between a hobby club and a nonprofit. It has more structure than a hobby club and less structure than the currently (2024) defined US 501-3(c). It has a governance structure with a charter, bylaws and officers. It does have the ability to manage financial resources, rent buildings, buy food for its member’s banquets, and fund itself (in some way to be determined one day.) But its main purpose is to provide its members with projects to do together. These projects can innovate but aren’t required to have any type of measurable Return on Investment(ROI) as traditionally measured. Instead, the project should have a JOI (Joy on Investment).

Somehow the project should be joyful, maybe fix a problem, or innovate a new art. Even as “products” can be 3D printed for pennies, these communities could focus on woodwork even though there is no “market” for their output. Their output is joy.

As each member works on these projects together, they grow as people. They self-actualize. They build skills, confidence, and a network of close friends. The output of these communities is more than some innovative projects. It is a strong community where people find meaning and happiness.

Ten principles contribute to the success of CoAs:

1 **Structured Program:** Each CoA adopts and follows one of many “Structured Program” blueprints for governance. There are many different kinds of “Structured Programs” that can be adopted by an individual CoA, but once it is adopted, then those who join it will use that program. This program is incorporated into the bylaws and the constitution of each CoA. The list of blueprints for programs are as varied as the types of CoAs that can exist. This program allows for voting, purpose, and allows members to focus on the roles that they want inside the CoA. It brings order to the community and fairness to its operations.

**Supportive Environment:** Each CoA creates a safe and supportive environment for members to work together on projects, create practices, and improve their abilities. Mentoring and constructive feedback is a key aspect of this supportive atmosphere. Every member has a mentor who helps them grow down their chosen pathways. Each member should feel totally welcomed no matter their starting point.

**Peer Learning:** Members learn from each other through constructive evaluations, feedback, and shared experiences. This collaborative learning environment fosters a sense of community and camaraderie. Even experienced members know that keeping a beginner’s mind is critical to keep learning. The mentor learns as much from the mentee.

**Effective Feedback:** CoA emphasizes the importance of constructive feedback. Evaluators provide specific feedback to help members understand their strengths and areas for improvement. This feedback loop is crucial for personal development. Feedback sessions are scheduled and well-defined.

**Regular Meetings:** CoA typically meet regularly, allowing members consistent opportunities to work on their projects, practice, and refine their skills. Regularity in meetings helps establish momentum for the projects.

**Leadership Opportunities:** CoA offers members various leadership roles within the community, providing hands-on experience in leading projects and community activities. This allows members to develop leadership skills in a practical setting.

**Positive Reinforcement:** CoA encourages a positive and encouraging atmosphere. Celebrating achievements, both big and small, contributes to a positive learning environment and motivates members to continue their development.

**Flexibility and Adaptability:** CoA clubs can adapt to the needs and preferences of their members. If needed, they can change their direction, projects, and themes. This flexibility allows for a diverse range of projects. They might split into two or more communities if their projects get too large.

**Networking Opportunities:** CoA provides an excellent place for networking and building relationships. Members often come from diverse backgrounds, providing opportunities for collaboration and mutual support. The friendships built while working together on a passion project will last the members’ lifetimes. This builds stronger overall cities, countries, and global communities.

**Global Community:** Being part of CoA means belonging to a global community. Members have the chance to connect with other CoA worldwide, attend local cities’ showcase festivals, and participate in international events, expanding their perspectives and networks.

By adhering to these principles, CoA creates an effective and empowering environment for individuals to enhance their own abilities and increase the level of joy in the world.

A Tale of Change

By Julia Yusupova

A Tale of Change

Part 1: The Beginning?

Once upon a no-time and pre-space, there lived a Great Spirit who was unchangeable, ever-present, and all-knowing. Literally, every possible idea that would ever exist, and many more, were parts of Its knowledge. However, the Spirit wasn’t satisfied that it only knew these things, but had not yet experienced them. And there is a difference between the two. It is one thing to know a recipe in one’s mind for example, but it is quite another to actually practice cooking it, as all inexperienced cooks soon discover when they try. So, because Spirit yearned to experience, it decided to act on one very deep part of its nature.

“Change!” It commanded itself with the first Intention ever. And because this came from the ultimate source of everything, the power of this purpose is and always will be unlimited and eternal.

Now, some very credible people these days think that Spirit first changed into a singularity – an infinitesimal point that contained absolutely everything within itself as raw energy. But other credible people are not so sure that such a point could ever exist. They have other ideas involving strings, collisions of branes, and an all-at-once periodic reshuffling of everything to a primitive disorganization. But that is how it goes with the Great Spirit – no one can be absolutely certain about its origins.

Anyhow, let us assume that the change that Spirit directed really did follow steps out of a singularity. Concentrating its will throughout the tiny point of light, Spirit blasted itself into materiality with a Big Bang. First, it unfolded like a hot, dense roll of energetic fabric. Three minutes later, as the energy continued to expand and began to cool, Spirit contemplated the next change to undertake.

“I can’t add anything new to my fabric, because I am already everything there is,” it thought. “How can I create change without adding anything new?”

Suddenly, an idea solidified.

“Vibrate parts of your fabric in such a way that you create various bundles of waves,” the idea suggested. And Spirit understood.

“Divide!” it directed itself through its Secondary Intention.

Tiny ripples arose in clusters within the fabric. Some of the ripples reverberated in a certain positive way, and nowadays we call these ripples protons. Other ripples fluttered negatively and are now called electrons. And of course, some of the neutral ripples are named neutrons. Through creating protons, electrons, and neutrons, the Great Spirit had also created Division. But perhaps it was through these symbols that Spirit’s ideas began to be put into words.

For 300,000 years, a time period that didn’t seem at all that long to Spirit, the universal fabric continued to unroll while cooling. Protons, electrons, and neutrons were now rippling all throughout. But the initial Intention that the Spirit had unleashed was not satisfied. In fact, it never again would be. A new type of change was imperative. But what else could be done if already the three fundamental types of vibrations existed?

“Well, of course, I could go on creating new types of vibrations to infinity,” thought Spirit.

“But then you would just be doing the same thing over and over again,” noted the Primary Intention. “You would just be creating new types of vibrations. Where is the novelty in that?”

Suddenly, Spirit had a breakthrough – a leap of an idea.

“Aha!” it thought. “If I combine the vibrations together in different combinations, I can add images and textures to my fabric.”

“Great idea!” congratulated the Primary Intention. “You are thinking outside the box. Let’s work on that together.”

“Merge!” willed Spirit through Its Tertiary Intention.

And so Spirit and its three Intentions began sculpting different designs from the basic vibrations, just like a group of excited children with different colors of Play-doh. Initially, they built the simplest structure, a hydrogen atom, from just one proton and one electron. It was very easy and quick to construct. There was something stimulating about molding two opposite parts in such a way as to bring them together into a stable bond. A dazzling little spark of energy went off every time. The Spirit child became so fascinated with building Hydrogen and continued to do that for so long that now it makes up nearly three quarters of everything that we see through a telescope.

Soon, Primary Intention had to send a reminder to Spirit. “Remember to change,” it whispered.

“Oh yes, of course,” Spirit replied, as it moved on to combining together something slightly more complex – Helium, with its two protons, two neutrons, and two electrons. Once again, the child became mesmerized with building Helium. There were more pieces to play around with. More variety. More questions.

“What happens if instead of two neutrons, I use one?” wondered Spirit, as It created Helium-3.

“And why is it so difficult to remove the electron, after it has been stuck to the atom?”

While exploring these questions, Spirit ended up turning Helium into nearly a quarter of everything currently visible.

Having built hydrogen and experimented with Helium, the Spirit was flooded with a surge of invention. Entertained by the rush of discovery, it set about creating all the other elements in the periodic table. Tertiary Intention was still present all throughout space and time, and slowly exerted its influence on the clouds of Hydrogen and Helium. For a billion of years, Unification used a force, which we now call gravity, to gather the gases into clumps. As they condensed, the temperature at the core of their masses rose incredibly high and the stage was now set for Primary Intention to swoop in and set in motion a new type of change – nuclear reaction. Spirit started creating heavier elements, with progressively more pieces and unique properties. And innovation was the name of the game. In the process of creating new elemental structures, there arose some astonishing creations.

Part 2: Life

Stars were formed as gravity clumped masses of hydrogen together into spinning discs. Unification was playing with yoyos. The centres of the discs turned into a variety of sizes and colors – white, blue, yellow, orange, and red; the brightest Alphas and the dullest Omegas; some as hot as 80,000oC, and others as cold as 2,500oC. Exhibiting self-organization, these beings started out by converting Hydrogen to Helium within their cores, in the process letting out tremendous flares of energy. As the Hydrogen supply ran out, the stars then began to build Carbon from Helium and in the process expanded into red giants. Soon, layers formed around each star, in which all other elements were produced from various reactions. As the outer layers blew away from the expansion, each star then compressed their atoms and became a white dwarf, or exploded in a colossal supernova, showering the universe with its assortment of elements.

The space dust on the edges of newly forming discs solidified into balls of hot liquid fire.

“Hot potato! Hot potato!” yelled Spirit and its Intentions as they played with these soon-to-be planets.

Spirit was very happy with what the team had produced up until then.

“I can make amazing creations with you three,” it delighted. “Through Change, Division, and Unification, my project will keep constantly transforming and developing. The fabric of reality will keep unrolling while I myself remain as constant and changeless as I have always been.”

“Exciting, isn’t it?” proclaimed the Three Intentions. “Let’s get to work!”

Now, the distance of 150 million kilometers between one ball of molten lava and a yellow star called the Sun, was apparently one of those distances that was just right for the next stage of the Spiritual enterprise. For 500 million years, which appeared as approximately 5 minutes to the Spirit, the lava cooled, but the temperature was still warm enough to prevent gases from freezing. The surface of the space sphere, which we now call Earth, solidified into rock. One steamy gas, known as water, condensed into thick, dark clouds above the rock and caused rain for thousands of years. Our future home planet, now had the appearance of extreme gloominess that we see on rainy days. So much water came down that oceans were eventually formed, abundant in dissolved carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and various other elements.

“Ooh! Look how fun this looks!” exclaimed Unification as it grabbed Spirit and raced to the scene.

Together, they undertook the connecting of numerous atoms into macromolecules like children frolicking with toys. They built carbohydrate Lego trains with long chains of linked saccarine cars and yelled “Choo-choo!” with glee. They gently blew through wands and watched fatty acid soap bubbles grow and float off appealingly. They braided nucleic acid gimp threads to create long strands such as RNA and DNA. Finally, they twisted and connected amino acid elastics to produce protein loom bracelets.

Playing with these toys was so much fun for Spirit. Change and Unification were delighted as well.

“There is so much variety here!” they exclaimed, “So much novelty!”

“I wish to keep combining!” Unification stated.

And so the first stable sequences of chemical reactions between protein molecules closed into catalytic loops, encircled by protective lipid membranes, nourished by carbohydrate energy reserves, and genetically programmed for action and change via nucleic acids. Spirit had formed the first hypercycles and over the next 500 million years tweaked these creations through little changes into the first living cells.

A cell was an enterprising little creature – a self-generating network of components precisely interrelated through its own cycles of chemical reactions. Although the structure of a cell was somewhat rigidly determined through genetics, energy and matter could still flow between the cell and the environment. And quite frequently, the cellular cycles of reactions integrated the incoming material from the outside. This is precisely how cells were able to respond to their environments, and in a sense also influence and be influenced by them.

When Spirit finished creating cells, It was suddenly struck with déjà-vu. The behavior of these little creatures, as they went about maintaining their internal processes while absorbing and assimilating parts of their surroundings, and emitting products, was reminiscent of other creatures that were already created. Stars, as well functioned in comparable ways.

“Interesting,” thought Spirit. “I willed to create change and difference, yet these distinct aspects of me are now acting as similarities.”

This satisfied the deep, immutable component of Spirit. And with great curiosity, it continued Its project.

Part 3: Networks

Now, the early Earth was a very dangerous place for little bacteria. Every which way they turned, the little buggers were exposed to severe sunlight, harsh droughts, crashing meteorites, erupting volcanoes, and overpowering floods. Many times the combined parts of each cell – the membrane and internal components – went their separate ways under exhausting conditions of suffering. Integrity was an all-consuming task. But the Intentions were there to help.

“Remember, speed is your strength,” Division reminded DNA. And DNA listened and began to replicate quicker, to increase cellular survival.

“And you were designed for flexibility,” Change advised the catalytic reaction loops within cells.

And the reactions understood and began performing more contemporary maneuvers in their synchronized dancing. Like classical ballet with its moves of combined strength and grace, fermentation was one of the first acts. Then followed nitrogen fixation, zesty like latin samba, allowing bacteria to create a multitude of colorful proteins for every possible function. Next, the stage was set for the breathtaking acrobatic complexity of photosynthesis. Just like B-boys utilize physical momentum to achieve windmills, flares, and head spins, photosynthesizers captured and used solar energy to accomplish their own adroit tricks.

“Combine your skills for a grand spectacle!” requested Unification.

And all the dance teams coordinated themselves with precise timing. The carbon dioxide that could have been depleted by photosynthesizers, leaving the Earth cold and uninhabitable, for example, was cleverly restored by fermenters. In this way, cunning balance permeated itself through the networks of literally thousands of biotechnologies all around Earth. And another form of life was inaugurated – Gaia. The Great Spirit was tremendously pleased. Even planets now exhibited the universal characteristics of similarity it had witnessed in stars and cells.

At this stage, the bacteria separated and covered the surface of the Earth. They lived in waters, soils, and sediments. And although, they were interconnected through a global network of chemical interactions, something else was missing – unwavering cooperation.

“You must substantiate your bonds,” Unification advised.

And the individual cells clustered together into colonies. In some groups, multiple layers of slime were formed. On the front lines, the top layers exposed themselves fearlessly to the sun and shriveled away as heroes to protect their bacterial nations from the ruthless enemy. Some of the injured were saved, thanks to the emerging medical technologies of DNA UV-damage repair.

“It’s no use getting injured so readily, though,” the bacteria reasoned. “Let’s concoct a sunblock pigment to defend ourselves.”

“But, we don’t want to battle anymore,” other cells exclaimed. “Let’s move to saline environments and protect ourselves in salt bunkers.

In other tribes, a financial system of genes was established.

“I’ll give you this gene for that one,” the cells bartered with each other.

Communication and productivity increased. Less than 1% of genes actually remained permanent in each cell. Genes, like money, were not initially designed to be hoarded.

As the bacterial populations flourished and filled the spaces of the Earth, precious hydrogen became depleted. Bacterial industries required it as a resource for construction of organic compounds, and fuel for manufacture of food and energy. Greedily, the bacteria consumed the cherished substance for their own selfish needs, without any care for future generations.

“Population crisis! We are all going to die!” some bacteria began to profess.

“We can solve this,” a certain entrepreneurial blue-green bacteria advocated, as they introduced an innovative new green technology known as oxygenic photosynthesis.

You see, the photosynthesis up until that time used only hydrogen sulfide as a resource for energy. The blue-green bacteria proposed water as the abundant fuel for the new photosynthesis. But the bonds in water molecules were stronger than in hydrogen sulfide. More investment from the bacterial governments would be required to break them. Were they ready to take such a costly step towards averting hunger and starvation of the masses? They were and they did. Oxygenic photosynthesis proliferated, coloring the Earth in shades of vibrant green.

However, the struggles of bacterial nations did not end there. Cyanobacteria now produced oxygen as a waste product. For millions of years, the Earth was able to absorb the oxygen and bond it with its hidden metals and sulfuric compounds. Then came a point of saturation, and the oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere causing smog and all kinds of health problems among the bacteria.

Once again the cells cried and complained, “There is so much pollution. We are killing ourselves!”

And many did die. Species first became endangered and finally went extinct. Nations were annihilated by the plague that was oxygen.

“What misery! What devastation!” the individual survivors wept.

“What change!” Primary Intention’s voice boomed wisely and clapped its hands excitedly.

“Don’t give up!” Combination motivated the lonely left-over cells. “Reorganize!”

And then the little blue-green bacteria summoned all their remaining resolve and focused all of their trust into their inner strengths of fast replication and adaptability. Soon enough, the Great Spirit provided them with the next amazing surge of creativity.

“We can use the oxygen and turn it into something useful,” bacteria realized with a flash of inspiration. “We can recycle!”

The cells drew in voluminous breaths and exhaled contented sighs of gratitude for Spirit’s help. They had just invented respiration.

“I can help, too,” Gaia said in her nurturing voice. And like a mother overseeing her children, she stabilized the oxygen production to above 15%, so that her little bacterial children would not suffocate, and below 25%, so that they would not burn. Also, she used oxygen to weave a blanket of ozone to cover and protect herself and her children from the severity of the outside world. Life on Earth was now safe to continue evolving. Mothers are such caring creatures.

Meanwhile, like rowdy teenagers, the bacterial cells began combating each other. In competition, one cell would use various tactics to engulf another and steal its materials. The Intention of Division was thrilled at the ensuing struggles and cackled cruelly like an vicious witch. But once again, after an initial little while, Unification arrived on the scene.

“Remember me?” it asked sweetly.

“We sure do,” replied the cells. “You’re nice!”

Suddenly, they comprehended what needed to be accomplished next.

“I’m sorry that I tried to eat you,” said one bacteria to another one inside it. “Maybe, we can strike a deal. I certainly still need food and energy, but I shouldn’t constantly destroy other cells. What if I let you live inside of me safely, and in turn you can supply me with food for me?” asked the outer bacteria.

“Sounds like a deal to me,” replied the inner bacteria.

And the cells developed symbiosis. Various organelles, such as mitochondria, chloroplasts, and nucleus compartmentalized within cells. And although each section was physically separated by a membrane, chemically the network of processes within each cell grew exceedingly more efficient. Cooperation always prevails over destruction… eventually.

But Division grew furious.

“It’s not fair,” it shouted at Unification. “Spirit created me before you and I must be given a chance to do my work as well.”

Then it thought hard about what it could do to create a potent division throughout Spirit’s experiment. Finally, it came up with the idea of gender. And so it applied its efforts and released a huge force that intensified the differences between pairs of cells, which were at that point innocently exchanging genetic information and appeared very similar in all aspects. This is how there arose the male and female biological genders.

“This should make things more riveting for Spirit,” snickered Division triumphantly.

Along with sexual reproduction, came a decrease in the cellular abilities for self-repair and regeneration. Aging and death emerged. Many people nowadays believe Division to be a vile intention. To a certain extent, they are right. It is a somewhat more malevolent entity than Unification. But a little bit of Division is always paramount. Were it not for its separating abilities, Spirit could never achieve everything that it had set out to accomplish within its project, including the eventual triumph of Unification.

Part 4: Complexity

A new type of transformation was looming. Increasingly, globular multi-cellular gatherings began to develop cutting-edge capabilities, such as coordinated amoeba-like movements of whole groups from one place to another. Change was guiding Spirit through a dynamic stride along the evolutionary highway. Early animals and plants entered the red carpet in all their glory and glamour, showcasing nature’s hard-earned achievements.

In the oceans, the cells within each conglomeration learned how to co-operate. Advanced intercellular communication networks developed and eventually evolved into the first nervous systems with miniscule brains. Maintenance of such nervous systems produced a lot of excess calcium, discarded to produce trash heaps of coral reefs. Once again, life faced another pollution crisis. But as we have already seen, such disasters are ideal conditions for the workings of Change. A moment of 100 million years later, larger animals began to use the waste calcium to build and carry exotic shells and skeletons.

By the time the marine creatures began venturing out of the water, plants had already successfully immigrated from their native oceans to new lands, full of promising possibilities. However, adjusting to the culture shock of the new terrain was a challenging task indeed. Like acquiring a new language, the major difficulty involved developing novel breathing organs. This was no endeavor for the feeble. Tough skin was required to protect against harsh sunlight. Only the strong were able to remain as foreigners on new ground without running back to the comfort of their birth homes. Strong were those with sturdy muscles and bones to fight against the uncompromising pull of gravity.

The ones that were able to survive for subsequent generations forevermore kept reminders of their nationalities. Just like immigrants who raise their children speaking their native language in a foreign environment, these animals continued to provide marine pouches for their young in their eggs. Cultural heritage is passed on through blood. Even now, humans still carry that oceanic saline water in their blood, sweat, tears, and wombs.

Amphibians turned into reptiles and then dinosaurs who overtook the Earth like dictator tyrants. Insects proliferated like the masses of the fragile and the insignificant who are condemned by society to a life of poverty. Flowering plants appeared with their fashionable ensembles and sweet etiquette. They charmed animals and bees into companionship, and then used them to spread their seeds. Like mafia, fungi developed underground business partnerships with the roots of plants, and like governments forests expanded to control entire regions. Some dinosaurs began to fly and patrolled the skies like aircraft.

“Where is society going?” many wondered once again. “Will we ever live together in peace?”

Some began to profess the coming apocalypse. And then, like a ball of fiery rage, God’s will came down and decimated the Sodom and Gomorrah, which was the Cretaceous period. This is the story that the survivors told their offspring, anyway. Meanwhile, Spirit was watching.

“Silly creatures,” it chuckled. “I am not cursing or punishing you. These things happen naturally. Don’t you understand that every little bit of you is part of me and can never be destroyed?”

Part 5: Civilization

The survivors celebrated their perseverance in the face of catastrophe. In the absence of dinosaurs, mammals established a new dynasty. Unlike cold-blooded reptiles that left their offspring to fend for themselves after the hatching of eggs, mammals developed warmer, more caring hearts.

“We want to cuddle our children in our bodies,” they said kindly, “and stay close and care for them after they are born.”

Birds too, began showing the wisdom of compassion. “We’ll fly to find food for our babies,” they chirped, “and teach them how to build nests when they’re older.”

With the help of Change, certain types of mammals transformed into pre-monkeys called prosimians. They lived in trees and jumped, twirled, and somersaulted from branch to branch like children in a park playground. Their hands and feet grew flexibly skilled and accustomed to such acrobatics.

“Make sure to look ahead at where you’re going,” advised Change like a concerned parent that did not wish for its children to become injured playing. The prosimians developed frontal eyes and 3D eyesight.

Of course, there were also other bigger and tougher kids on the playground – bullies. They hunted for smaller, defenseless creatures and installed fear among skinny, geeky prosimians.

“What can we do to defend ourselves?” the prosimians asked each other.

“We can stick together so that these hooligans don’t attack us,” suggested one.

“We can pick up rocks and sticks and defend ourselves from the ruffians,” another one offered.

“When I jump down from a tree,” said one, “I will stand up straight while using my hands to pick up food from the ground, so that I will see if there is any danger around me.”

“Let’s make a system of yells to notify each other when a bully is coming,” one ingenuous prosimian proposed.

And so evolved social mentality, upright posture, and vocal communication. It’s funny how fear can sometimes inspire cooperation and creativity. Working together helped the little prosimians grow closer and stand up against the dangerous predators. Eventually, the prosimians transformed into monkeys and apes that continued the tradition of using rocks and sticks to make tools. As an undeniable aspect of Spirit, technology has been co-evolving with life and stimulating brain growth ever since.

Eventually, prosimians transformed into monkeys and apes. Austrolopithecus, the first upright-walking ape, roamed the African woodlands and savannahs like a mighty king for one million years. Sometimes, even Change needs a rest. But after stability’s fifteen minutes of fame, progress was once again ready for action.

“I really liked the group-work of prosimians, monkeys, and apes,” recalled Unification. “I will intensify these creature’s social bonds.”

It did this by eliminating hair from the bodies of Austrolopithecus. Babies were born unprotected, with exposed skin. Therefore, mothers had to nurse them for longer periods of time. Fathers had to form communal bonds with the mothers, in order to protect their offspring. Families evolved, and from there communities, tribes, and villages. Inklings of society were emerging.

At the same time, increasing tool use and vocal communication dynamized the brains of these creatures. Intelligence, in the way that humans are used to defining it anyway, gradually emerged. Homo habilis turned into Homo erectus, exhibiting even more adaptability and innovative behavior.

Let us not forget about Gaia, who herself went through Change. Covering herself with a blanket of snow, the great mother went through a period of melancholy, like all women do sometimes. However, this Ice Age caused incredible alterations in the lives of Homo erectus – hunting of wooly species for warm clothing and food to sustain the body in the cold, control of fire for heat and cooking, and rituals of food sharing. The communication and closeness around the dinner table gave rise to the first myths, art, and language – truly social dimensions of the hominid experience. It is due to this boost of social reality that Homo sapiens finally made their entrance into the great flow of things.

The rest was history. Humanity proliferated and began to rule the Earth. But along came many problems – competition and war, hunger and starvation, pollution and habitat destruction, fear and anxiety. Their intensity was palpable. However as we have already seen, the Earth has witnessed all of these problems before, disguised by other eras and cultures, though essentially the same at their spiritual core. And just as in all other times past, by the time 2050 came around, innovation and adaptation triumphed.

Part 6: Gaia

In 1859, with the inspiration and help of Spirit, a wise man named Charles Darwin published a book that gave a name to the grand experiment – evolution. An extremely ingenuous first theory of change, it was however incomplete. It defined evolution as only life on Earth, not the whole universe. It explained evolution’s forces as only Change (genetic mutation) and Division (natural selection). Division, of course, was quite happy with such spotlight. Wars, conflicts, and destruction prevailed among humanity. Unification, who has accomplished so much through time, was forced to take the backseat. There was no room left for altruism in the world of competition and survival of the fittest. Luckily, in the end more inclusive explanations of evolution had arisen, which gave due respect to Unification.

An Intention is impossible to kill. One can only stifle it for so long. Unification continued to exert its quiet influence from behind the scenes. Compared to 1,500 BC when 600,000 separate nations inundated the Earth, in 2024 there were only 200. Though wars and conflicts were still regular parts of life, the people kept hope and remembered that progress is a meandering turtle.

“So what is next?” the people wondered.

“Consciousness,” the Great Spirit hinted. “Focus on embracing this mysterious force, learn all you can about it, allow it to flow and work through you. Surrender to this higher purpose, and all your problems will be solved.”

And the people listened and understood. The deepest portions of their minds, bodies, cells, and molecules began to vibrate with ancient solutions. Just like the ancient aerobes, we tapped into them through the simplicity of focused respiration, which connected us autopoietically in feedback loops through repetitive cycles to the atmosphere around us, and so fed us into the higher global organism of Gaia. As this divine femme awakened, she began to speak loudly, conveying to each individual their own specific ideas and actions for Her ultimate purpose of survival and success. We accepted her motherly instructions like yearning children, and like the Intentions, we delighted in the creative play of our work, thereby infusing the whole process with our collective soul.

And so like the bacteria which learned the arts of cooperation and symbiosis, we too overcame egoic selfishness in order to grow into one multi-cellular tissue of collective consciousness. Following the example of blue-green bacteria, we used the accumulation of toxins in our environment to introduce novel green technologies and sustainable resources. We faced and accepted Division as a rowdy child in need of our acceptance, and so grew wisdom to also see it as an ancient Intention, and part of the divine plan. We allowed Unification to show us how to balance out Division, in instances like the gender revolution. Just like the mammals and the birds, we learned the importance of family, whether traditional or not, and practiced compassion as a way of life, donating money and time to the less fortunate. As the prosimians, we used our intense fear of the predatory forces of materialism, consumerism, totalitarianism, and new world order, to spark radically novel emergent abilities that helped us adapt and prevail through communication and cooperation. Like land animals, we used our rudimentary wisdom of the aquatic past stored in our bodies and the collective unconscious. Solutions to every crisis the earth has experienced through history were already stored within us in this way, and were simply allowed to be unleashed with trust and wisdom as powerful forces continuing evolution.

References That Inspired This Story

Capra, F. (2002). The hidden connections. Doubleday.

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life. Anchor Books.

McCarthy, G. (Editor), & Baillie, D. (Director). (2010). What happened before the beginning? [Television series episode]. In McCreary, L. (Producer), Through the wormhole. U.S.A.: Revelations Entertainment.

Moore, P. (1995). Astronomy. Coventry, England: Hodder & Stoughton Educational.

Phipps, C. (2012). Evolutionaries. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Swimme, B. T. & Tucker, M. E. (2011). Journey of the universe. Yale University Press.

The World Counts to Five

By Greg Beatty

Whack!

My granddaughter flinched a little at the sound when I blocked, even though she had been the one swinging a stick at me.

“Again,” I said.

She moved the jo back and forth, from a ready position to one more poised for attack. She swung again. “Oh, crap!” I said. This time I just barely avoided getting hit by stepping inside the arc the jo made as it sailed toward my ribs. I ended up standing on Kate’s toes.

Kate laughed, and I stepped back and said, “Nice job!” I gave her a little high five with one hand. She met it. Both of us kept our sticks in our other hands, and both of us laughed at the way we were eying one another, neither one of us trusting the other not to attack.

“Ready for a break?” I asked.

Kate shrugged, but tucked her stick under her arm and rubbed her hands, which meant no matter what she thought, she needed a break. I took her stick, paired it with mine, and leaned them both against the house.

I handed Kate her water bottle, and took a drink from mine. “Grandpa,” she said. “Why is it so much fun to fight, even when we like each other?”

“It isn’t.”

“It isn’t?

“No way! Fighting is scary. The world shrinks down, your heart pounds, and you might feel like you’re going to throw up, except that you have to keep moving.”

“Then why is it fun to crush you with a stick? Like a bug!”

“Ah, that’s different,” I said, taking another drink. “Play fighting is fun. We’re people, which means we’re caught halfway between apes and angels. That’s not my line, by the way. Lots of people have said that. But it means we have a higher nature, one of great love and kindness, and an animal nature, that can react with fear and violence. And we can’t just say no to that part of us: it is part of who we are.”

Kate looked skeptical. “We like to hurt people?”

“Part of us does. Part of humanity, and part of each of us. But if we’re healthy, and in the right context, it’s just done for fun. You know Grover, right?”

Both of us turned to look at the fat Chocolate Lab dozing on the porch.

“Sure…?”

“You probably don’t remember this, but when you were a baby, Grover used to sit beside your crib and watch over you.”

Kate shifted her drink into her other hand, and gave Grover a pat.

“But you know how he gets when we say b-a-l-l.”

Kate nodded. “Especially when it squeaks.”

“Right. He plays hard. He plays violently, even. But since he was raised right, he has never hurt anyone, not a person, not another dog.”

Kate looked out at the sky for a minute. “Does that work with people?”

“It does,” I said. “It does.”

“How?”

“Well, you know from your history classes, the world used to be different right? More competition, more violence, less cooperation. People didn’t get along as well as they do now.”

“So what happened?” Kate asked.

“Well, it took a long time, and a lot of effort, but the world finally changed. In fact, there were five major changes that helped people get along better. If you’re interested, I’ll explain them while we’re resting, and you can count them down with me. One.”

I held up a finger, and so did Kate.

“When things are going great, and everyone has more than enough to eat, people can cooperate or not. They can squabble, break into feuding groups, and gossip, all for little or no reason. Out of boredom, even. But when there’s a big challenge, from within or without, people have to get along, and eventually people realize it. The changes in the climate were the almost literal fire under humanity’s collective behind that showed us we have to get along. If one person is hungry, they might find food, and the problem is over. If one person is stuck in a frozen lake, they might get rescued by just one other person, or maybe two. When the whole world is threatened, everyone needs to act. They can act in large ways, and they can act in small, but that was the fire bringing people together.”

I paused for a moment, and Kate nodded seriously. Then, after a while, she put up a second finger. “Two?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Two. Changes in technology. When the digital revolution spread around the world, it moved through different places at different times and in different ways. There were places in Africa where folks used online banking on their phones when they didn’t even necessarily have electricity in their homes.”

“No!”

“Yes,” I said, waving my little accidental peace sign at Kate. “Computer technology spread slowly for a long time, then spread like crazy.”

Kate made a crazy face.

“Exactly. It went everywhere, and changed everything. Banks, grocery stores, schools, doctors, dating—”

“Didn’t you meet Grandma—”

“Hush. Yes. But hush. I’m explaining the whole world. I need to focus. Computers changed everything, the internet changed everything, social media changed everything, artificial intelligence changed everything, and eventually, people had to say, enough is enough.”

“And they stopped the change?”

I shook my head. “Nobody could stop the change. But when enough things went enough wrong—when the economy crashed, and it was all because of computerized stock trading, and it was the same week a completely false story caused a riot in Omaha, Kansas—people started trying to figure out how to redirect it. To use it, rather than being used by it. That’s where we got the emotional simulators, to help people feel what the results of their actions will be. And the extrapolators, to see the logical implications. And two more things: people got the right to their data, and, in large sections of the internet, verification became required. Rather than letting lies and misinformation speed at the, well, speed of light, we agreed to slow down, just a step, and only send claims with provenance.”

“Provenance?” Kate asked.

“It is like a line of promises. We all agreed that we will only pass things on if we can trace the message, the meme, the tweet, the claim, the bleet, the xeet, back to a real person. If a company or AI wants to post something, they have to put money down, since they don’t have a word to swear to.”

“Okay.”

“There’s also the lateral reading app, which everyone calls the fishbone.”

“The fishbone?” Kate asked.

“Draw me a fish?” I said in answer. She did, picking up her stick again and drawing in the dirt. She started with the pointed head and went down the spine to the flaring.

“You know how, once in a while, you read something online and you don’t know if it is true or not?”

Kate shrugged, flipping her stick once. “Kinda.”

“Well, that used to happen all the time. The fishbone app automatically links from the story you’re not sure about to all the other stories out there related to the first story.”

I drew in the fish’s ribs. “Fishbone.”

“Oh that. Sure,” Kate said. “That happens all the time.”

“That happens all the time now. Used to be, people didn’t know what others were saying, and got confused and lied to. It is a lot, a lot, a LOT easier for people to get along when they agree on what is true and real than when they don’t. Okay. Where were we?”

Kate held up three fingers. I did too, and gave her a snappy little salute. She crossed her eyes at me, and I went on.

“The next thing that changed was the economic structure. You’ve studied some about the indigenous people of our region, right? The first people to live here?”

Kate nodded. “We did a project. And heard stories.”

“Then you know some. Well, I won’t try to convince you that indigenous peoples were automatically perfect. That kind of false story just leads people to distort reality, and ignore what’s there. They were human. They made mistakes. In some cases, like the Aztecs, they made really dark, ugly mistakes. But most indigenous people around the world set up their societies so everybody got fed. Lots of other societies built in mechanisms too, so while people didn’t necessarily get rich, they didn’t starve. And other cultures did other things to make sure things didn’t get too out of balance. Jewish cultures had what they called a jubilee year, so every 50 years everybody’s debts get erased. You get to start fresh. Other places let the poor glean—

“Glean?”

“Glean.”

“Sounds weird.”

“It does. You know how we’ve watched harvests at the farm?”

Kate nodded.

“Well, gleaning is going in after the harvest and picking up what’s been missed. Apples that are too small for the machine to get. Ears of corn that got knocked down.”

“Gleaning,” Kate said. “Cool.”

“It is. For a while there, the economy was rigged wrong, making it easier for the rich to get richer than for the poor to get fed. We changed that, passing the gleaning laws and the right to data laws, so other people can’t get rich off your jokes, or memes, or pictures, and universal basic income. Basically, ha, what we did was make it so you can still get rich if you work hard, but everyone has enough. People get along much better when they have enough. You aren’t likely to steal something or beat someone up if you know you’re always going to have enough. Your baby won’t starve. You won’t freeze.”

“Cool,” Kate said again.

“It is,” I said. “But all of that wouldn’t have done anything, and wouldn’t have come into being, without people changing their hearts and minds.”

“That sounds hard,” Kate said. She frowned a little, and twisted her stick in her hands.

“You have no idea. No, I take that back. You do. You remember that time you fought with your brother?”

“Which time?”

“Ha! The big time. The time you two broke—”

“That time.”

“Well, you remember how long it took for you two to get along again? How you had to talk and hiss and clean up after the new puppy together?”

Kate covered her eyes. “We did not hiss.”

I pulled out my phone, and started to show her a video.

“You were explaining the world to me, I think!” she said.

“Ha!” I said again. “Well, think of how hard it must have been for all the different people, the different groups of people, to get along, after they’d fought wars and blown up their buildings and told each they were going to hell.”

Kate mouthed “How?” without saying anything.

“How indeed,” I said. “It took people from all the different religions sitting down together, and, well, less talking than listening. They, and all the people who didn’t really have a religion, listened until everyone felt heard, and until everyone agreed on the basics. We’re not ever going to agree on everything. You like mayo on your fries, I think that’s crazy. But even if we can’t agree to all do the same things, it turns out we can agree not to do some things. Like kill each other.”

This time Kate rolled her eyes. “People didn’t know that?”

“People knew that. But people felt scared, and like they had to act like they didn’t know that. And it wasn’t enough to just know that here.” I tapped Kate on the head with my stick. “They had to know it here,” a tap on the heart. “And here.” A poke in the belly.

“How did they learn that?”

I sighed. “Lots of trials. Lots of failures. Some people got hurt. Some got killed. But others kept attacks from happening, and took in refugees, and replanted trees together, and started neighborhood watches to keep kids safe and drains unplugged when the rains got heavy. They put on town plays together, and picked up dog poop at the park without being asked. Or paid.”

“And that was enough?”

I shrugged. “Not really. It was like, those were the actions, and we needed the words to go with them. Leaders from all religions finally started talking, all religions and all peoples. Some people had to leave their homes, due to war and crises. Well, that gave them something new to say. They spoke up for the world, explaining how everyone needed to get along. And eventually, one grandpa, one shaman, one inventor, one soccer player, one kid at a time, people listened.”

I looked at my five fingers, all open, all spread out. Kate spread hers too.

And we intertwined them, until no one could tell whose were whose. And we went on with our days and our lives. Together. Sometimes fighting, but mostly getting along.

THE END