SUE's Blog

In 2024 when the ELECTION for the Next PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES of AMERICA was about to take place ….ZARKOS ALUNA from PLANET ZARKON…came to PLANET EARTH to WAKE UP THE WORLD and Give HUMANS Solutions for All the Insanity of WAR$ …YES MONEY WAR$ …to TEACH HUMANITY how to SURVIVE Without KILLING each other but HELPING Each other …. He went to each Nation and EVAPORATED all the INSANE SOULS …yes they tried to KILL him for this SANE ability to remove the EVIL SOULS and any SOUL PLAYING GOD with a GUN…and HE SIMPLY EVAPORATED THEM…Historic reality….he created a NEW ATMOSPHERE that COULD READ THE MINDS OF EVERY SOUL of EVERY THOUGHT and if they were THINKING of KILLING ANYONE ..STEALING .. or SEXUALLY RAPING anyone or TRAFICKING CHILDREN or Selling DRUGS ..and every other INSANE Act of TREASON…against the SANITY of HUMANITY …. Yes thinking and planning anything that Would Harm Anyone… The NEW ATMOSPHERE on EARTH could Simply Evaporate them….PROTECTING HUMANITY from ANYONE ANYWHERE that would Do EVIL …and Guarantee Humanity would have SANITY and Live a Healthy HAPPY LIFE…and Now In 2050 every insane Soul has been EVAPORATED …and the only people LIVING on PLANET EARTH are SANE ..doing the most Good for Humanity … and Yes ZARKOS ALUNA was 1,300 years old back in 2024 when he came here to save Mother Earth from PLANET ZARKON where they have No INSANITY only SANITY and now he is 1,326 years old…and his ZARKONIANS they Live on average 3,000 years or more …and are HAPPY …and Yes they EVAPORATE Anyone on their PLANET who is EVIL and Yes TOTALLY INSANE !!!!!!!!!!! So STAY SANE or you will be EVAPORATED…yes…I know You are wondering WHO WON THE ELECTION… Well all the MEN who were Running for PRESIDENT …were Evaporated …ONCE THE TRUTH WAS REALLY KNOWN…. and a very Sane MOTHER .. of 5 children spoke out with SANITY and SOLUTINS to help REMOVE POVERTY Forever… and fulfil the words in the Constitution of the UNITED STATES of AMERICA… Yes THE PURSUIIT OF HAPPINESS was BORN.. Now in 2050 everyone on PLANET EARTHIS SANE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NO MORE WAR$$$$$$$$$$… YES it would make a Great FILM ..to INSPIRE Humanity to get SANE !!!!!! Before they are EVAPORATED !!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes .. . and 2050 will BE SANE !!!!!!!!!!!! FOREVER !!!!!!!!

Becoming Rhizomes in the Midst of Biospheric Collapse

What have they done to the earth, what have they done to our fair sister?
When the Music’s Over, The Doors 1967

They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell 1970
Where We Are: Dissociated from the Biosphere

I’m six years old – it’s the height of modernity; vegetables are frozen; appliances are hawked on TV, transistor radios crackle, the sun gleams off of car fenders. I’m home with my mother and tell her, “I want to go home.” What do you mean, she asks. Cadwalader Avenue? “No. I plead, I want to go h-o-m-e.” The word, Solastalgia was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in his 2003 book Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity.[1] He describes it as “the homesickness you feel when your environment is changing in ways you find distressing.
Today the sheer Real is saturating our psyches with multi-faceted pandemics related to the Cartesian mindset which separates, exploits and extracts resulting in ecological degradation, habitat destruction, species extinction, biospheric collapse commonly known as climate change alongside mass shootings,a viral pandemic, rapacious inequity, the rise of facism and a war which has brought the other “n” word (nuclear) to the forefront of our consciousness. As though there’s not enough suffering from the slings and arrows of daily living within the context of the Great Matter of LIfe and Death.

How We Got Here: Divide & Conquer
I and many of us would not be alive today were it not for advances stemming from a Cartesian mindset and I honor that; nevertheless, it’s this very mindset that has brought us to the brink of biospheric collapse.
Cartesian dualism coursing through our culture. We operate by separating, by spliting – from splitting atoms to separating calves and their mothers and from separating our minds from our bodies and ourselves from nature; in short by objectifying subjects aka othering – this in tandem with the delusion of a permanent I who must always win, results in ends used to justify means; for example, a manager at work advises: Don’t administer the questionnaire until after the treatment plan is written so as to delay the clock from ticking on our metrics, which is tied to bonuses. The Organization Man now sports blue hair. Moreover, this fetish for metrics is reinforced by the reigning paradigm’s belief in unlimited growth and consumption so that consuming is now an expression of patriotism. Self-restraint is tantamount to sedition. What was Bush’s advice after 9/11? Go shopping.

We’re acculturated into an excess of individuality. Excess in the ecological sense of coping capacity, a concept describing the limit of stressors that a system is capable of carrying adaptively. And excess in the sense that lack is manufactured in our ever TB-like consumptive society – there’s never enough – there’s always something new and improved to buy and then some. A consumptive jouissance that can never be satisfied and keeps markets open 24/7 with disregard to our circadian rhythms, to the fact of our being earthlings. In his book, The Nutmegs Curse, Amitav Ghosh writes about omnicide as the outcome of the Cartesian, colonial mindset. We’ve only recently started to extradite ourselves from falsely separating our minds from our bodies and from nature to reclaim relationship as an essential condition of existence, consistent with indigenous and Buddhist wisdom of interdependence.
The way we’ve been living for the past 250 years is maladaptive in the long-term; a seven-generations mindset such as held by the Iroquois, who consider the effects of our actions on subsequent generations as distinct from our society’s quarterly shareholder gain mindset. Excessively separating ourselves from nature is boomeranging to bite us. It’s as though the natural world after patient, long suffering is in the midst of a fierce transference neurosis. Please be so kind as to indulge my animisitic explanation: Despite Cartesian dualism, we are in a relationship with Nature, one in which we’ve been chronically abusive. For a long while Nature cowered, all the while resentment seethed to coalesce and rise up against the oppressive Other, occasioned by serial hissy fits of flood and fire that kill and destroy. The biosphere is raging, sobbing, convulsing. We didn’t set limits on serial, ruthless exploiting and now the violence is coming back to haunt us. And just as with our patient’s, we’re not the original offender, but we bear the brunt of it – the intergenerational transmission of trauma isn’t limited to humans.

Exploitive, extractive industries view nature as a resource that Others through commodifying, through monetizing soil, air and water, the very sine qua non of life. Moreover, there’s a new obscenity called, Natural Asset Corporations (NACs), which the World Bank touts as, “Harnessing the power of capital markets to conserve and restore global biodiversity.” Environmental concerns are hijacked by NACs representing themselves as the solution to climate change whereas their mindset of making a buck in all situations problematizes their so-called solutions. The neoliberal, rational, enlightened mindset performs the slave/master function to posit nature as out there, to be conquered and mastered and couches this as in the best interest of the enslaved. The insidious appellation Human Resources was coined to refer to office Personnel. Employee’s energy is extracted so that we go home completely exhausted, good for nothing and who is the silent partner? Human Resources. HR is a forceful driver in the world, a kind of sub-global corporation in its own right, deciding our health plans, our pensions, our benefits. It would be progressive to reclaim the term, Personnel. There’s a confusion of pricing and value in the reigning paradigm; however, not everything has a price. Value is inestimable.

To accomplish the nefarious task of monetizing nature, the world outside our doorstep had to be othered, objectified, desouled, desacralized, deadened, a Cartesian machine existing as resources for our use without regard for the inherent value, dignity and uniqueness of every grain of sand, every blade of grass, existing within the web of universal life.

What is the psychology of those who have a choice of vocation and choose to engage in the extractive industries? Is the earth a mother, a child or simply a resource? What is being enacted here?

In 1947, the Mont Pelerin Society* began to sculpt today’s reigning economic world order. The intention was to integrate the global economy with minimum regulation and without planning. The metaphor, “market forces,” is reified now to such an extent that it is experienced as a literal force of Nature but is in fact a force by design, by policy.

How We Transform: Two-Eyed Seeing The Ecological Third and the Rhizomatic Theory of Mind

Transforming the current wealth-based paradigm to a life-based, ecocentric paradigm requires “two-eyed” seeing; that is, dialectically intertwining indigenous knowledge and wisdom traditions with current science such as advanced systems thinking and interpersonal neurobiology. Truth emerges paradoxically via the pataking of alleged opposites. Affirming dialectically intertwined, disinterested disciplines circumvents the audacity of reductive, autocratic certainty of mechanistic dualism.

There are four characteristics of indigenous culture shared by Indigenous people around the world, according to Comanche activist LaDonna Harris: relationship, responsibility, reciprocity and redistribution. All are our kin, including animals, plants and the living earth and we are responsible to nurture and care for them. Taking and giving are reciprocal: We share – skills, time, energy and material wealth. And as Daniel Wildcat advises, we relate to flora, fauna, all that is as relatives, not resources.
People who live indigenously experience flora, fauna and entities such as rocks, minerals, soil as living, ensouled beings with their own subjectivity, which fosters intersubjective relationality, a living network that I call the Symbolized Real. Symbolized because nature appears as characters in indigenous storytelling, growing out of a felt, experiential relatedness. There is a felt porousness
with the surround. I harm only what I need to harm in order to survive and conduct myself with reverence towards those whom I need to harm. All beings and entities are a who – not an it. Let’s each of us ask, What is my relationship with the biosphere starting with the shrub outside my door? And whatever it is, does it, and if so, how does it affect my work with my patients?

Just as the clinician and patient create a third intersubjective reality, let us now admit the biosphere into the clinician/patient relationship. Let’s call it the Ecological Third. And not just because of the calamitous crisis but because this is our reality as beings in the biosphere, with other beings, many embodied, many not in what we would commonly identify as a body. We’re here together in one massive bio-heap, composting together. We’re rhizomes, continuously growing horizontal underground stems which put out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals, rooted in the Wood Wide Web. Like the quote from John Muir which Joseph will share, we’re all threaded together. We are the natural world. The biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes, “The mycelial web looks like a network of neurons . . . extending through the dirt, sending molecular messages between plants, like the electrical impulses of the nervous system. These signals can confer greater resistance to disease for the plants.” Resilience is strengthened when we relate & communicate as part of the web of life, such as rhizomes do by forming networks, which relate and communicate laterally. This is significant towards our goal of creating an equitable world. Trees are great. Who doesn’t love a tree? But trees have become stand ins for hierarchy as shown in umpteen corporate organizational charts. By the by, I hope that we start to call Case Conferences, Emerging Conferences to reflect a rhizomatic trajectory of the psychoanalytic experience as the concept, case seems to me to be stuck in positivist, reductive thinking, connoting something that’s encased, ossified in space and time and objectified, denying the ongoing, emerging evolution of an intersubjective field.
Our minds are distributed throughout our body and beyond; these are the vibes we pick up from one another. Such intuition implores us not only to do no harm, but to assume sentience in all who are – fish & wood, water & soil – yes, let’s use animate pronouns to indicate sentience in all matter, including inorganic.

Because I’m disheartened by extractive capitalism, don’t think for one moment that I’m heartened by how socialists or communists treat the fauna and flora dwelling in their midst as their economies operate in an human-centric register; that is, I have a prefrontal cortex and opposable thumbs and therefore can do what I want, when I want, to whom I want whereas an ecocentric civilization reflects the reality of our existence: we’re one species in a vast network of myriad interdependent species. Similarly, let’s consider the psyche as distributed not only throughout our body but throughout the planet.

Psychotherapy is a liberatory experience as it strengthens the capacity for choice. It seems to me that a critical psychotherapy would engage with liberatory social transformation. We are the shamans of our culture. We create realities. Our job now includes being doulas to midwife a ecocentric civilization as we transform from a wealth-based to a life-based economy. How do we listen to our patients in the midst of the pervasive ontological insecurity ripping through the world today. Do we have the will to engage adeptly with multiple subjectivities? Do we have the courage to dwell in uncertainty, in interstitial limbo? With Todd we ask, What stories will emerge, shepherding us into this new paradigm of symbiotic holobionts as one jewel within the web of life?

A plethora of organizations worldwide is percolating to address all aspects of living such as regenerative energy, economics and agriculture and includes indices for well-being and flourishing economies to replace the GDP, an index of the monetary economy.

I realize now that my homesickness expressed at age 6 was a longing for a loving relational experience with the natural world. Now, decades later I have a word for it, solastalgia. Let’s create a world where matter matters, where the well-being of all beings matter & every entity, organic and inorganic is and feels at home.

Write as if it’s 2050 and Earth is a cooperative place. How did that come to pass?

 

Looking back, few would have believed that such a simple concept would change so much.  And yet, the idea of bringing neighborhoods together as Villages caught on like wildfire.  

 

But few saw what would happen next, as local connection ushered in a more resilient, more tolerant, more connected era of society.  Many now agree that the huge steps in our grand reconstruction were made possible because of this powerful movement for local connectivity.

 

It all started when I finally accepted my calling.  

 

In a moment of clarity, I realized that as much as I loved thinking about the grand problem, and how to orchestrate a grand solution, I wouldn’t be of much help without focus. 

 

I’ve always enjoyed and been good at bringing people together.  So that’s where I focused – through the forest of ideas to save the planet, I saw the tree of my contribution – bringing people together in their local neighborhoods.

 

Next I started forming Villages in workplaces, nonprofits, and neighborhoods.  I got to know people with very different views on things, and instead of selling an idea or action, I simply became a friend, and offered a space to stay connected.

 

It was a strange concept to most – that we would come together with no agenda, only to connect.  Most on the left really wanted to talk about environmental disasters, vegan diets, and minimalism.  And on the right, folks wanted to avoid the politics and just get to know each other.  Could such a divide be crossed?

 

New Villages sprung up, led by passionate community organizers who also saw their tree in the forest of solutions as local organizing.  The first gatherings were sparsely attended.  Those who showed up were either new to the area, or already invested in the idea of community building.  

 

Still, each core group turned into hot furnaces of leadership for their neighborhoods, and within a few short years, they attracted hundreds to join their Villages, with weekly gathering attendance between 20 and 30.  

 

Villages began to spring up in neighboring neighborhoods and cities, and national media helped form a narrative and generate excitement for folks to give Village a try.

 

The secret to the Village model, and why it was accepted by such a diverse group, was its liberating structures: just enough to keep things orderly, but not so much that people felt preached to, patronized, or constricted. 

 

What happened next was truly remarkable – emergent.  After building relationships within these neighborhood-based Villages, members who had passions for specific causes or ideas had space to share these, and other members listened.  Minds were opened, and people began to change, slowly, to find value in the ideas others were sharing.

 

A decade later, when the proposal to change the national base powerload from coal to nuclear was being debated, Villages had spread to every state, and became the place where the many sides of this debate were discussed.

 

And when the Refugee Reformation Act was proposed to begin accepting millions more South Americans into the States, local communities responded quickly by offering to host new residents.  And as they arrived, they quickly found a home at their local Villages.

 

Step by step, through the waxing and waning of wars, the changing of presidents, Villages continued to grow and connect people in ways that felt right, and respected the values most hold dear to their hearts.

 

Today, we are at a monumental place in human history, having finally released the shackles of greed and corruption that has burdened our journey towards justice for eons.  For the first time, we have faced our demons as a united human race, admitted our wrongs, and are working productively to correct them.

 

As this grand project of healing our planet and our collective traumas unfolds over the coming generations, thanks to Villages we may also deeply enjoy each moment of life, connected, playing, creating, and sharing experiences together.

 

How did we do it? It took a Village.

—

OLD

 

It all started back in 2020, when I invited a bunch of friends together for a potluck, and a gathering. I pitched the idea of starting a Village that would meet every month, so we could deepen our relationships and learn about and from each other.  I wanted the feeling of a church without the doctrine or preacher.  Much to my delight, people loved this idea!

 

Our gatherings moved to virtual and weekly during the COVID lockdown, and while many of the original group ended up leaving, new people joined with passion for the project.  We became known as Village Seattle.

 

I kept experimenting by starting Villages in others communities, then things really took off in 2024, when pilot projects in Seattle and Boise began bringing neighbors together in regular gatherings.  

Yes, we did it! Proved that we are superior and most adaptable species on this planet; but this time by embracing and not by endangering other lives. We always had the right tools but they were at wrong setting. Year 2024 was when a handful of us came together and formed a strong fist.
First finger HONESTY: We realised ‘filters’ work better when applied on mind rather than photographs. [referring to Socrates 3 question filter here “Am I sure that what I am going to say is true?”, “Is what I’m going to say a good thing?”, and “Do I really need to say it and is it useful?”]. We accepted that image building was important than image editing, and started applying filter technique. Most of the frivolous talks stopped, conversations started getting meaningful. People started sounding profound. The WAR problem was solved, and unanimously agreed that the greedy rich shall no longer to be served.
Second finger HARMONY (symbiosis): We were struggling for food, our species were fragile, hungry and highly dependent on other species, only this time for regeneration and not for consumption. The manmade biodiversity loss, disappearance of species powered by greedy ones was affecting every one of us. The only smart way tackling that was to turn to the voiceless animals. We accepted the fact, “our world is theirs too”. Thanks to ‘image building’ we all started extending compassion to all species instead of restricting it to the selective.
Third finger RIGHTS: The greedy became needy. The rich ones until then, proudly shoved their middle finger on those who were talking about peace. Non-cooperation movement from working class made riches realise and say instead “help us please, we shall give you the right!” The oppressed now politely said, “since you are only a few up there talking from the dark sky – why don’t you come down instead, and we start off again tonight!”. Our influencers learnt to bow down, asked the oppressed ones for forgiveness. Thus entire humanity agreed on humility.
Fourth finger ecology: We were successful at starting the healing machine once the killing machine had stopped. We started eating plants, and planting trees. Restored balance, maintained health of our people and the planet. Mother nature started taking over, but she was injured and couldn’t do it alone, she needed our help.
Fifth finger economy: We used human power to demolish this infrastructure, employed people to restore nature, deployed them onsite to build wildlife sanctuaries and pay people to take care of voiceless instead of paying them to slaughter. We realised our economy can still grow and generate jobs to restore nature.

In 2024 we underwent a behaviour change and transformed ourselves!

In the year 2024, a turning tide began, 🌊
A few united souls formed a powerful clan. 💪🏼

Honesty stood tall,
Socrates’ filter applied, truth for all.

Frivolous talks ceased, conversations turned sweet. ✌🏼
Climate to be healed, everyone repeats.

Image building worked, empathy grew,
Compassion extended to all, not just a few. 🦧🐄🐏🐖🐓🐛🦊🐊🐇🐀

Profound voices echoed, war was no more, 🕊
The greedy rich agreed, their reign was o’er. 🧎🏻‍♂️

Cooperation replaced oppression’s might,
Forgiveness sought, humility in the light. 👐🏼

Oppressed voices echoed, “come down from your height,
Let’s start anew, restore what’s right.” ✊🏽

Biodiversity loss, a manmade plight, 🐝
We turned to voiceless creatures, sharing their plight. 🐄

Balance being restored, and health regained,
Mother Nature was healing, but help she retained. 🌳

Consumerists transformed, conservationists stood,
Extravagance replaced by a minimalist mood. 🧘🏻

Stress gave way to sweet relief, 😇
Laziness defeated by an active belief. 🏃🏻‍🏃🏻‍♀️

Human power dismantled the old, 🏗
Restoring nature, a story retold. 🌱
Confusion subsided, confidence grew, 🧗🏽‍♂️
Deficiency turned to sufficiency, a breakthrough.

A tale of change, a journey’s success, 👣
For we are the architects, in goodness we express.

Jobs for restoration, growth with green, ♻️
A thriving economy, a planet serene. ☘️

Every region has same religion, ⛩
humanity restored peace it feels divine.

Abundance of fruits here 🍓, now available in a punnet, 🧺
we no longer aim to visit any other rocky planet. 🌑

Now in 2050, a transformed sphere, 🌏
Goodness in business, a mantra to adhere. 🤝

Here we are in 2050! Now, all we got to do is spread “goodness with our business”.

Regards,
Amit Gambhir
LogicSense Limited

We’ve just received from Jay -our local community AI- the results of the WORLWIDE HAPPINESS REPORT. Were you in it? Are you part of this great event?

46 million people in the world are enthusiastic owners of their “inner home” today and I’m thrilled to broadcast it for you in this beautiful morning of March 2051 !!!

All these people reported to have easily embedded through Virtual Reality the INNER POSITIONING personal and transpersonal development methodology. With it they’ve learnt to recognize the negative position they were taking in attitudes , emotions and thoughts in each of their inner rooms (areas of their lives).

They saw and experienced the energy loss that such a personal sabotage was doing to their mental health and to their emotional and physical wellbeing. How can anyone dwell in a house full of dust, dirt and disorder? Through the integrated AI in the virtual reality that the IP method offers, people were capable of changing “positions” in each of their inner rooms by a deep cleaning of every corner.

They experienced an immediate Opening and Growth in Consciousness and many also reported an amazing Spiritual Wake Up. Comfortably safe and happy in their own inner space, they’ve learnt to “inhabit” their inner house to make it their real “inner home” which is the final encounter with their real Self. Friends, this is really changing the face of the world !!!

Raquel Torrent from the local RTG radio broadcasting to the Universe.

I would like to extend my appreciation to the administration and teachers of Umberland College, to the parents and friends who have made this day possible through their enduring support and encouragement, but most of all to the graduating class of 2050. You are, without question, the greatest gift to our society.

When your President Richardson asked me to give this commencement address, she had two requests: please share your story of the transformation from 2024 to today, and please try to keep it brief. I am proud to say that these remarks will absolutely meet one of those objectives. When I went to college, we would have said that fifty percent was a failing grade, and if you are wondering what a ‘grade’ is, that’s its own history lesson for another time. Suffice it to say that we had different ideas about the purpose of education in those days.

In 2024, most of you were significantly less corporeal, and if you are not enamored with history, you may not be aware of the very different nature of the world’s societies back then. Yes, societies… plural, for we hadn’t yet come to appreciate the reality that is so obvious to us today: that we are one species, one strain of being in a uniting ecosystem. Don’t blame your parents for not seeing it right away, or your grandparents for not seeing it at all. They were raised on chemical-infused food substitutes and grew up in a world fixated on advertising, with an internet driven by profit and fueled by rage. Thirty years ago, countries still measured success based on a concept called Gross National Product, or GNP, rather than today’s recently instituted measures of Net Collective Happiness and the Opportunities Index. I won’t even mention the phenomenon known as ‘reality television’. Trust me, you’d rather not know.

I was fifty-seven years old in 2024, with no expectation of living to eighty-three—not because eighty-three was biologically hard to obtain, but because society appeared to be on a collision course with its own ego. I ran a small charity at that time, one focused on understanding the nature of consciousness and trying to share that new vision with a world preoccupied with material acquisition. It wasn’t an easy message to deliver, and especially not to the decision-makers of that era.

My charity had something, however, of tremendous potential. We, and several organizations like mine, recognized that as conscious beings, we have the ability to influence the world around us, and that such influence starts with conscious, deliberate intention. We saw the potential for a new approach to raising children, how shifting focus at the very beginning of a person’s life could have profound impacts on the choices that person would make throughout their time in this world.

Let me explain the plan. No, you don’t get to graduate until I finish, but I promise not to give you a day-by-day account.

What became clear to me was that the overwhelming majority of the problems the world of 2024 was facing were the result of our living within a shame-based culture. Rather than embracing exploration and recognizing mistakes as the fertilizer in which we grow, we raised children to feel that it was unacceptable to be wrong. Where most children today are taught to focus on reaching their own potential, in 2024 they were told that success was came from striving to appear more than their peers, whatever “more” could mean. We had not yet come to appreciate that two people can never be compared meaningfully in such a fictional absolute. We had not yet embraced the reality that diversity gives rise to a strength far greater than uniformity could ever achieve.

From this realization we started the Mindlight Academy.

Mindlight focused on three things, three forms of resources. First, we provided resources to parents who wanted their children to grow up feeling comfortable with themselves. We showed them how to encourage their children to be open-minded, how to be critical thinkers. And perhaps most importantly, we enabled them to take responsibility for this themselves rather than relegating it to government or educational systems.

Second, we established resources to give very young children the tools necessary to build healthy relationships. We taught them how to listen, how to express themselves, and how to gain mastery over the outdated and self-destructive patterns of clinging to the familiar. They were taught that growing up is not about losing one’s youth, but learning to leverage it to everyone’s advantage.

Third, and most importantly, the Mindlight Academy established a community of mutual support. We knew that books and games would only take things so far. To make a change of the magnitude required, a few hours a week would not be enough to resist the pressure of a consumerism world. To be successful, families engaging in Mindlight needed a support network to help them stay on track—something to remind them that there is more to life than money, and that the type of control that matters most is the control a person has over one’s self.

To be honest, I didn’t think it would work. My charity was far from wealthy, and the expenses for running Mindlight at a meaningful scale were steep. I cannot recall how many times we thought the program was over, but at each critical moment we found someone who believed in what we were doing and was willing to invest to keep it rolling. To appreciate just how miraculous this was, you must realize that the affluent in the 2020’s typically made investments based on how much money they would receive in return. Mindlight was an investment in forging a healthy society, one that would come to downplay the importance of money, making it secondary to goals such as maximizing kindness, joy, and harmony. It was a hard sell, as we used to say.

Mindlight endured in a state of continual existential crisis for nearly a decade, and then in the mid-2030’s everything changed. Mindlight-supported children were now in the public education system, and patterns were emerging. These kids demonstrated strikingly low rates of anxiety. The critical thinking skills that had been ingrained in them, combined with a thirst for exploration and an absence of fear of failure, had produced children who were performing off the charts in every way: academics, arts, collaborative athletics, and social stability.

The world began to take notice.

Of course, that attention had its pros and cons. Mindlight became very popular, with an almost alarming expansion of programs. At the same time, however, it attracted attention from very powerful people who were not excited at the idea of a society filled with intelligence, critical thinkers. We had several offers to buy the Academy for huge sums of money, always with contractual clauses that we would not institute a similar program again. There were outright threats.

Fortunately, by that time Mindlight had expanded so significantly that there was no longer a single entity driving this cultural change. More and more parents were becoming not just members of the wide-spread Mindlight communities, but proponents in their own right. By 2040, Mindlight was no longer an organization in any practical sense. The philosophies of the program had reached far enough, deeply enough, that it was simply a societal expectation. It was ‘how things are’.

Now, ten years later, we are seeing a new breed of leaders emerging. People are voting for political candidates who speak honestly and are focused on solving problems for the greater good. People support businesses based on how well they care for their employees and the degree to which they improve the world. Last year’s Congress of Nations, the first assemblage of every single government on the planet, unanimously signed into the law the Freedom of Opinions act.

And that is the world we give to you, the 2050 class of Umberland College. Care for it, enjoy it, and make your corner of it a little bit better than you found it.