I didn’t know it at the time, how far reaching this change in my life would be. No one could see it. Not right away. It was not a new hoodie, not a new fitness routine. The change began inside of me. It began when I woke up March 1st, 2024. The world looked the same— until I looked at everyone in it differently.
I looked at my son not as my son, but as a person who had me for a father, a person whose inner life I could only guess at—and yet still appreciate. The woman walking her dog past my front door was not a prop whose existence ended when she disappeared stage left; she was a wholly formed and living person who encompassed and created her own valid and thriving universe, as real and as valuable as mine.
These experienced realizations were glimpses of something new to me, though they did not occur by accident. They came with effort.
Then the work really began. I wanted to treat every person I encountered in this way, without reverting to turning them into objects. I wanted to see my Uber driver, my restaurant server, my wife—all as the sparkling, world-enveloping individuals they are. I did not have to like or condone every choice they made or all the things they said, but I could understand how they came to those decisions and to say those words. And so, in this way, I could value these people, loved ones and strangers alike.
From the start it was hard. To engage in a single conversation—even a single interaction without words—and not retreat to my habit of putting all lives in the context of my own life. To treat each person in my life as an individual, not conceptually at a convenient later time and date, but right then and there, in real time, when engaged at that moment with another living human.
There had to be a first time. It happened with my son, and I felt like a champion. Lighter, stronger, free. But the process didn’t get easier. Each time, I had to start at zero, had to fight the same bad habits and the same lazy comfort zones. Only with persistence—and, I think, a little bit of love—did I wear away those habits and comfort zones. I eventually got through a day where I brought this awareness and respect to most of my interactions.
I did the same thing the next day. And the next. And the world began to change.
At first, my wife experienced the change in me. Then my son. They couldn’t pinpoint what was different, but they felt different when they were with me. More there. More loved. It was in their expressions, in their willingness to talk, in their demeanors. It was in the face and body language of our grocer, the teller at the bank, the young woman striding past me with her earbuds in. In the wake of my work to understand others something unexpected happened. Others began to try to understand me.
I would have died happy if that was the extent of it. I was living life as though my sixth sense was fully turned on. Life was more meaningful, the connections with the people in my life more powerful.
But life is dynamic.
This appreciation for others, and for our vast differences, continued to develop. At times, I spoke of it, explained to friends and acquaintances and people I just met what I had purposely changed in my life. Other times, I said nothing of it and yet discovered people who’d reached the same destination by a different route. We found each other, I believe, because our shared demeanor to the world attracted us to each other like planets around a sun. All of us in our way embraced the recognition and the understanding of our individuality, and in so doing our numbers rose.
As did our challenges.
For ours was a far from a full picture. If we were to be true to our humanity, we had to do more than embrace our innate individuality. We also had to embrace our sameness. When we gazed into the nighttime sky, we had to admit the twinkling stars that awed us were us. I had to admit my atoms were your atoms, and our inherent human need to strive and explore had enriched us with such insight. We had to admit the questions of our origin and our fate remained unanswered. We had to admit, in fact, we were all questions.
In the face of the unknown before us, it would have been easy to despair, to concede that as far as we’d come in our understanding, we were like snails who’d moved an inch in a marathon.
Instead, we let in our humility. We gave our humility space to grow so we could acknowledge and give respect to all that was still a mystery. We had to concede our science did not explain nature, it helped us know the rules of the game—but the game was not reality.
With humility, we admitted that nothing in the universe was predetermined, that as far as we knew the future of the universe might be shaped by its parts, not the other way around. We embraced the fact that thus far we had no indication the universe had a teleology. Yet we could welcome the freedom to act like it did.
We didn’t agree on all the details of a teleology. But we adopted the idea that if a teleology existed, it could be grounded in what united us—us humans, but also all pieces of the universe. Atoms? we wondered at first. No, not atoms, for those had a start date. Consciousness. It preceded all matter, all data, all designs. We moved forward as though the teleology of the universe was consciousness aspiring to more consciousness.
A growing number of us took up this embrace of our sameness and difference, of our knowing and ignorance, of our separation and communion. Not, mind you, as an intellectual exercise or a theoretical lens through which to observe the world. Rather as a daily comportment to the world, as a way to live in the moment. Through this approach, we both viewed and experienced the fractal nature of consciousness, where we each contained discreet universes and were at the same time part of a larger, singular universe.
This took time, and the road was not without its bumps and setbacks. But as we stuck with it and as people joined our approach, things got easier.
We cooperated more. In our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our committees. We had more sympathy, for those who struggled, those who asked for help, those who challenged us—intentionally and simply by being different. Our knowledge grew and our understanding of what that knowledge pointed to grew deeper, more relevant.
Our creativity thrived.
Discoveries in the quantum world strengthened our technological capabilities and the meaning of the bonds connecting our lives, all lives—past, present, and future.
Our technology improved and opened new pathways for us to be in two places at once. Not any two places, but behind the eyes of another, so we could see through each other’s eyes at the same time. Once we managed two places, we then managed several, and many more.
This opened to us new levels of empathy. It wasn’t a thought experiment but a true simultaneous experience of self and other. Seeing both sides, and with practice then seeing all sides. It was beautiful and challenging and difficult and boundary opening.
It wasn’t limited to humans. This was a jarring discovery, though it should not have surprised us. After all, consciousness is not limited to humans. So it was with awe, at first, then joy that we began to look through the eyes of animals. And we again took hold of humility.
We had already realized at least some of our faults and our triumphs. But through the eyes of animals, we learned that in spite of the structure we placed on our concept of the world, in spite of the insights we amassed from that structure and the progress we’d made enriching our consciousness, the plants and animals of the world didn’t really need us.
Yes, we brought music and stories and questions into the world, but the world with all its other creatures would go on without us. In fact, the world might be better off without us, for along with the good we brought so much degradation and waste. The world didn’t need saving. We did. Through the eyes of a fish, a chicken, a cow, a dog, a baboon this was all too clear.
Our priorities changed.
This was not inevitable, but once we’d attained the ability to live the world through the eyes of our brethren and sistren, not changing felt impossible. They were no longer objects, no longer food measured in pounds. The other living creatures on our planet joined in our endeavor to know ourselves, in the world’s endeavor to know itself. The bonds between us, from the atomic to the microscopic and beyond, were brilliantly obvious, dear, and worth fighting for.
In the radiance of this revelation, which we could not forget even if we tried to erase it from our minds, we extended legal rights of equality to all of nature. The voiceless won a triumphant and urgent voice. Meanwhile, as our thoughts and perspectives gained complexity and nuance, our need to accumulate things dropped away, our urge for buying sloughed off our reignited spirit like a discarded cocoon.
The sun and the wind and the water powered our lights and our computers for a time, and then the power came from the energy in atoms, quietly, while swaths of our former cities and our scarred countrysides rewilded. Pockets of our oceans re-flourished. Our soils regained nutrients, our waterways flowed free of garbage and poisons. By 2040, we’d set aside half the Earth for non-human creatures. We visit and study these wild lands and seas, marvel at and give thanks for them.
Concepts we recently considered infallible became the biases and superstitions of a bygone era. The imagined realm of corporations, where arbitrary figments could earn and own but never be held responsible, faded into memory like a childhood game.
The worshipers of money-driven economies, which had thrived on the misconceived idea that they represented reality, fought back for a spell. Egalitarianism went a long way, however. When occupants of the c-suite and the boards of directors had to eat their own food, live in the shadow of their own smokestacks, bath in the water of their own settling ponds, the tunes they sang and the history they quoted changed.
Mantras centered on productivity and profit went silent as the meaning of growth morphed into something other than “growth at all costs”. The financialization of every aspect of life generated decreasing returns, as the things we valued defied quantification. Unbounded wealth accumulation became a gross artifact of the past, inconceivable to most and, at any rate, outlawed and futile in a world of flat taxes.
National boundaries lost their cachet in the face of transborder cooperation. Investor-state disputes went extinct. Wars based on greed and prejudices dwindled. Squabbles between states are more and more settled among diplomats educated in our expansive consciousness. We recycled the war machines, and the funds that once poured into weaponry is now supporting life.
When the calendar flipped to 2050, we were right to congratulate ourselves for the barbarity we left behind over the last couple of decades. We have much to be proud of.
Yet we cannot deny we haven’t figured out everything. Not most things. Not all the physical and spiritual diseases. Not the meaning of evil. Not the nature of time. Not the ease with which we resort to violence. Not the still nagging questions at the heart of our existence.
But our lives have become multidimensional and vastly richer in science and art. We continue to discover corners of the universe, internal and external, that we’ve never seen before. Life is evolving before us in ways unimagined in the 2020s, still precious and unique here on Earth and nowhere else.
The questions of life remain, but in increasingly refined and beautiful forms. And more importantly, we all have the luxury to pursue answers both as individuals and as members of a greater and complete consciousness.
The journey goes on.