Goodbye... and Welcome!

Well, it's finally up and running: my new web site www.mind-futures.com. Everyone is welcome. I am looking to build a community of people who are passionate about developing practical and grounded visions and tools which can help create Deep Futures - futures which are not merely about more money and machines, but futures that are deeply meaningful, profound and spiritually fulfilling. Feel free to share your own ideas and links on the site!

I won't be writing on this blog anymore. But the good news is that there is a new blog on the new site. http://www.mind-futures.com/category/blog/ I would love to see you there!

All the best,

Marcus

Bright Lights in the Sky

 No, this is not the actual image (I didn't have a camera at the time)

I know some people who have read my books will have heard this story before. But it has never appeared on this blog, so I re-tell it here. Marcus

Some people ask me how I got interested in knowledge that might be considered "alternative" in some circles. Here is a little story about an extraordinary experience that certainly helped me along my way! So here goes my story, and one hundred per cent true.

In 1996 I was living in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia, a small coastal town. One day I was walking along the street downtown, and I saw a sign which read: "Psychic readings, $10". I had never had a psychic reading up till that time, and curiosity got the better of me. So I went inside and met a woman named Lesley who gave me a "reading." The reading itself was nothing particularly special. But what followed certainly was.

To cut a long story short, I ended up going to one of Lesley's talk/meditation evenings a few weeks later. At the end of the talk she told everyone present that she had had lots of dreams about UFOs the previous night.

"Whenever I have these dreams there are lots of UFO sightings around," she said. "So if you go out tonight you may see something. I feel that about two in the morning would be the right time."

Now, being the gullible fool that I am, I decided to take up the offer. I went to bed at about 11 p.m., but set my alarm for 1.45.

When the alarm rang, I managed to drag myself out of bed. I stumbled around my house for 15 minutes, and then headed outside at 2.00 a.m. sharp.

My eyes almost popped out of my head when I swung the door open and looked up at the sky. For flying right in front of me in the clear night sky was something I had never seen before. I can only describe it as a large ball of luminous white light, about a third the size of a full moon. The thing was probably a few hundred metres in the air, and was floating eastwards at about 90 degrees above the horizon. There was absolutely no sound, and it seemed to be gliding on air. I can only describe it as eerily unearthly. I ran out onto the road, and watched it disappear over the neighbours' houses. In total it was in view about 30 seconds.

Blood On All of Our Hands

One of 18 passers by who ignored Yue Yue as she lay bleeding and unconscious in the street

 I was so appalled by the following incident i wrote the following oped, which I have submitted to Hong Kong's 'South China Morning Post'... Marcus

This week within and beyond China observers have been shocked at images of passers by strolling past the still body of a two year old girl, lying unconscious in a small street in Foshan, Guangdong.

Neither of the two drivers who ran over the little girl stopped to help. The first driver got out of the car, then convinced that he had not been seen, drove away. Later he called the parents, refusing to hand himself in, but offering cash. After being arrested he defended his actions, saying that he only did what everyone else in China would have done in the same circumstances. The horrifying possibility is that there may be some truth in what he said.

Rightfully, both the media and the blogosphere in China have expressed outrage at the incident. Just how did society reach such a point whereby the only person willing to help a dying child in the street was, perhaps prophetically, a garbage lady?

Deep Futures talk

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk about Deep Futures, at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. It's now available online. In the talk I discuss the need to deepen our view of the future to acknowledge a broader range of human experience, and move beyond what I call Money and Machines futures. The talk includes a discussion of the changing nature of human intelligence, as well as the idea of a non-local intelligence, or Integrated Intelligence. I also link this into the futures of digital technology. 

The first five minutes or so is an introduction by Dr Luke van der Laan of USQ. Here's the link:

mms://winmedia.usq.edu.au/adfi/20110802_digitalfutures.wmv 

Marcus

Can Technology Humanise Education?

 Salman Kahn

Can technology humanise education? Salman Kahn is one man who genuinely thinks it can. Salman Kahn has become something of an online celebrity with a very simple idea: putting learning materials online via videos. His videos on YouTube have had millions of hits, and the feedback appears to be excellent. Even Bill Gates has come onboard, as you will see in the video below. Most of the Kahn Academy videos appear to be related to math, but others are science and physics related. The Academy is no-profit.

The greatest positive of Kahn's system appears to be that kids can learn at their own pace. Kahn argues that, many kids start failing becasue they have knowledge gaps, when they fail at one small step in the learning sequence. In Kahn's system, the student simply stays at each step until they achieve mastery. That requires ten correct answers to problems related to that step.

Bill Gates calls this the future of education. From what I have seen, it certainly has some very positive, possibly transformative benefits. The video is certainly worth watching.

I may even go and try a few of the math videos, and see if I rekindle some enthusiasm for numbers!

Interestingly I watched another Futures related video today. The video (you'll need to download the software) can be viewed at the site of the Australia Digital Futures Institute, part of the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. It appears on some new software (Connector)  that I have not seen before, which feeds the video at the same time as displaying the PowerPoint, and e-comments by those watching the videos. It's much longer than the Kahn video, but well worth watching by anyone interested in the future of learning. One thing that interested me was a vote taken by the lecturer, Professor Gilly Salmon, where she asked a simple question: what should be the main priority of education in the future (I have forgotten the precise wording). 90% of the students said that a digital focus was the most important thing, choosing that option above other choices, including better teacher education. As I argued in yesterday's post, I do have reservations about making digital media the prime focus of education (because, unless balanced with a self-reflective inner wisdom, it can create a dissociation of mind, body and psyche). Nonetheless, there are clearly many exciting possibilities emerging from Futures education at this time. The humanising of education may be one.

Check out the Salman Kahn video, below before making up your mind.

Marcus

Crisis, deep meaning and the opportunity for change

I have failed in my foremost task – to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul, there is a buried treasure in the field, and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.     Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, towards the end of his life

One day, when I was about eight years old, my school principal Mr Suley got up on the morning assembly and spoke from the heart. Now, more than 30 years later, I cannot remember all the details. What I do remember though, was his tone of deep concern. He spoke about war, the environment, cooperation, and simply what it means to be a decent human being. And I will never forget what he said at the end of it all.

“You are the future of this world. My generation has already had a go and we messed it up. You must do better, or we will not be here much longer.”

Of all the things anybody ever said in my schooling days, this was probably the most impactful. Here he was, an older man approaching retirement, and he decided to speak about something more than keeping the playground clean, punishing misbehaviour, or the principal’s old favourite: “Get ready because the exams are coming up.” Mr Suley spoke of life itself, and what it means to be a human being on this planet. They were words of deep meaning, words that moved me. They were moving words because they were not just spoken, but felt. I went through another ten years in the public education system after that, and I honestly cannot recall any teacher or administrator speaking with such impact, or about something so meaningful. This silence always puzzled me.

Mr Suley has probably passed on by now. I heard some years ago that he was involved in a car accident, and that his wife had been killed. I was deeply saddened. It would also have been a tragedy if he had passed up the opportunity of speaking meaningfully on the assembly all those years ago. He may not be here anymore, and maybe he suffered greatly though personal tragedy. But the seed he planted on that day lives on in the man writing this article in 2011.

Many of us can probably remember a defining moment from our younger days when a teacher, parent or elder spoke from the heart and moved us, made us think deeply. But what about public educators today? How many have ever engaged in a discussion or a lesson where they shared something from deep within? The answer for many educators is that they rarely touch upon the deeply meaningful. Why is that? 

At first glance the answer might seem obvious. There is the issue of personal vulnerability. Maybe the students will ridicule or ignore them. Maybe the teacher will offend someone’s religious or philosophical beliefs. And who wants to upset parents in these times of legal accountability? Besides, it is not in the curriculum or syllabus, so why go there?

To go deep requires courage.

Yet (rather appropriately) the absence of meaning goes deeper. To understand why education discourses have become an effective litany of surfaces we have to look at the situation in depth. At the bottom (or perhaps “top” is a better term) of all human experience lies the transcendent, that which connects us to a greater whole, where the boundaries between self and others, individual and cosmos become blurred. And that takes us into the awkward but profound territory of human spirituality.

Yes, the dreaded “s” word. 

To truly appreciate the lack of depth in modern education, media and popular culture, we must examine the way that our society has developed, who controls the dominant discourses, and the ways of knowing which under-gird them. And finally we must take into account the very way in which modern science and education view the human mind and its intelligence.

In this time of shifting global power and economic uncertainty, the restoration of cognitive depth along with associated “right-brained” cognitive processes (including spirituality), is something we can no longer ignore. The reactivation of cognitive depth is a necessity not only for economic and social stability, but for the long-term survival of the human race. The current uncertain global economic climate is the perfect time to begin to initiate change in both culture and curriculum, and expand the ways of knowing that we employ in the society and in the classroom. This is a discussion which lies at the heart of the creation of  Deep Futures – futures that are profound, passionate, engaging, and most of all deeply meaningful. More money, machines and amusement for everyone is not enough. These do not fulfill the human spirit.

Crisis and opportunity often arise together. Will we grasp the chance? Or will we be yet another generation that has failed to take the opportunity, the responsibility,  that we are being given.

Marcus

Manipulation, Control, and the Spiritual Mind

Conscious Transparency: Control and manipulation

In my next few series of posts I am going to write about some of the ways that developing Integrated Intelligence, or INI  and conscious transparency can assist in your personal evolution, and that of society in general. Conscious transparency is the greater awareness of information both within and beyond one’s own mind, including the workings of the human ego (which tends to be deceptive). Each post will deal with a specific problem in work, education or living in today’s knowledge economy.

In this first post I am going to deal with an obvious feature of today’s hyper-capitalistic world: the manipulation and control by governments and corporations.

Within the knowledge economy, individuals are extensively and continually controlled and manipulated. There is an agenda to shape individuals to fit into the societal machine. As late educator James Moffett pointed out in The Universal Schoolhouse, this manipulation process often contradicts the desires and needs of the individual, and especially the calling of his/her spirit. Thus, the State and/or corporate power structures may suppress not only ego-centered drives, but spiritual ones also. While selfish behaviours (ego) might be considered negative, the latter spiritual urges may be seen as assisting in the overall evolution of consciousness in the society. There is therefore in modern societies an unintentional muffling of greater human and social development due to the system’s requirement for short-term control of the human ego

Education has become part of the consumerism and materialism of the modern age. The ‘corporate takeover’ of education can be traced back to a wider social problem. Critics have pointed to the powerful controlling influence of mainstream establishment culture David Loye equates this “Establishment” with the paradigm of the “Pseudo-Darwinian Mind”:

Arising during the twentieth century, this is the control of the masses and a widespread, passive, and compliant academic elite through the possession of television, publishing, and practically all other media by an economic and power elite, which finds in old-style survival of the fittest, selfishness uber alles Darwinism the legitimizing or excuse it proffers from and pays for in science (David Loye, from The Great Adventure).

WikiLeaks & The Matrix: Neo Goes to Jail

 Marcus T Anthony's new web site and blog can be found at: www.mind-futures.com.

For more recent insight into WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and his feud with Daniel Domscheit-Berg, click here; where I have written an intuitive review on Domscheit-Berg's book, Inside WikiLeaks.

My last blog post was a relatively mundane comment on the implications of the WikiLeaks story for anyone who writes personal stuff on the internet, whether using their real identify or their pseudonym (which probably means several hundred million people!). This time I’m going to move into a rather ‘deeper’ level of the whole saga.

Most discussions in the mainstream media, including the blogosphere, examine issues at a fairly superficial level. They probe the surface level, the facts and arguments which define the appearance of a problem.  They will sometimes also explore the systems level of the problem, attempting to uncover hidden determinants which lie behind the scenes. Even the most radical of these, such as conspiracy theories, still tend to remain at a fairly superficial level of analysis. Someone is pulling the strings: the oil companies, the Chinese, the Illuminati, the aliens, whomever. The problem is that such examinations simply shift focus from one part of a system to another, regardless of how “hidden” that part may be.

I suppose you could say my “expertise” lies at another level beyond the systems - the consciousness domain. This is where mostly unconscious drivers and energies are influencing the problem.

The most popular version of the WikiLeaks story sees defenders and attackers lining up on two sides of a divide, ready to save or condemn Julian Assange. He is either a defender of free speech and accountability (the majority), or a criminal threat to social and political stability (governments and minority of the general public).  Defenders say we have the right to know what the government is saying and thinking. Attackers say he is dangerously destabilising the system.

Let’s move to the next level.

Behind all life stories there are deeper narratives which exist at a psychic level. Here I am going to examine some of the psycho-spiritual issues which underpin the actions of Julian Assange, in particular the soul issues which he is facing in this lifetime, including the karmic situations behind them.

Is the Future is Calling You?

“The state of empirical psi research continues to advance while the state of skepticism continues to stagnate. It doesn't take precognition to guess who will eventually win that type of debate. How long ‘eventually’ will be depends on how many people are actively engaged in research.”

Dean Radin (reference)

Last Saturday evening I was walking past a bar in the Central district of Hong Kong, when I noted a game of rugby on the flat screen TV inside. Now I’m a bit of a rugby fan, being a former player, and since the game was between Australia and the New Zealand All Blacks, I ducked inside to check it out. To my great delight I saw that the game was already in the second half and that Australia was leading 22-9, with just 30 minutes to go. As an Aussie, this was too good to miss, so I sat down and ordered a glass of red wine as a pre-celebration drink for the impending great Aussie victory over the mighty All-blacks. A few minutes of viewing allowed me to see that Australia was dominating the game, and the All-blacks were being run all over the park. The NZ team looked like a complete rabble, like a ship without a captain. On the other hand Australia looked very sharp.  They looked certain winners, for to lose it would require a roughshod NZ team, who had been completely outplayed, to score two converted tries in the last 15 minutes.

At that point I did what I often do when watching sporting events. I measured the energy on the outcome using the Quick Check. I have found that this divination method is extremely reliable for picking the outcomes of sporting events (although if I am ‘following’ one of the teams, I sometimes get over-excited and get the reading wrong). I didn’t get the reading I expected or wanted. There was no ‘energy’ on Australia winning the game.

Allow me to backtrack a little.

The first time I realised that sporting events are actually determined before the opening whistle is even blown, was when I had a dream during the 1991 rugby world cup. One night during that time I had a dream where I saw the English captain Will Cahling being interviewed and thanking his supporters for the tremendous victory they’d had. The next day I learned that England were playing Australia, so I stayed up to watch the match with my flatmate. Even though at that time I had not really developed none of my ability in Integrated Intelligence, I felt strongly that the dream was a precognition. As the match progressed, Australia took the lead, and stayed there. In the final minute of the game, Australia was leading by one or two points, and they had the ball in hand (which means England would not be able to score). I told my flatmate that Australia would lose the ball and England would win. Well, I was only half right. An Australian player decided to kick the ball, and England took possession. It was literally the final second of the game, and he was on the half way line, way out near the sideline. I watched bemused as he ran backwards (away from Australia’s tryline, where he was supposed to be running!), suddenly pivoted, turned round, dropped the ball onto his foot. The dropkick straight sailed over the goal posts from an impossible position. Never looked like missing.

The full-time siren sounded. England had won. There followed a few ads, then Will Cahling appeared and thanked the English supporters, just as I'd 'seen' the night before. (As an aside, my flatmate was a die-hard science graduate and skeptic, and refused to accept that my prediction had been anything more than good luck, after I told him how I ‘knew’. I was a skeptic too at that time – but an open-minded one).

Another precognitive vision of a sporting event which I had was symbolic (in fact many precognitive dreams occur in symbolic form). It occurred just before the 2004 cricket world cup. Australia went into that competition as the reigning champions, but had lost a lot of games, including a warm-up game against a low-ranked team, and many people wrote them off. However, I had a dream which convinced me they were going to ‘wipe the floor’ in that competition. As I was half asleep thinking about the competition one night, a vision came to me of a giant wild boar, running towards the tryline on a rugby field. The image was of an unstoppable force (imagine being a rugby player and trying to tackle a great boar charging towards you!). I just knew that the boar represented the energy of the Australian team, and that it symbolised their path through the upcoming competition. The vision was true. Australia smashed all other nations and went through the competition undefeated.

I have also had many premonitions involving my participation in sports events. One Saturday morning about 15 years ago, when I was to play a game of rugby, I awoke and heard the song “You go and save the best till last” being blasted into my head (I often hear these songs to this day).  I felt strongly that it was to do with the game I was going to play. When I got to the playing field I was very disappointed to find I had been put on the reserves bench. I was a bit pissed off to tell you the truth, but remembering the song I had heard that morning, I decided to be patient and kept my mouth shut. I waited, and waited... Half time came and went, and the game was drawing to a close. Then with just two minutes left the coach threw me onto the field on the wing (which is where I played anyway). I had barely run on, when our half back made a short break in our own half. Bypassing my two inside centres, he sent a long cutout pass to me, perfectly timed, such that I was into open space. I ran the thirty metres or so to the line without a hand placed on me, and scored. There was no time for a restart, and the game was over. The best had indeed come at the last moment.

After I was taught the Quick Check, I became able to predict the outcome of most games before they even began. Or even during games. I remember that during the 2005 soccer world cup, I rang my wife, and she said she couldn’t talk because she was watching a game, and they were having a quick penalty shoot-out at the end. I did a Quick Check and told her Korea would win the shoot-out, and that she needn’t bother watching. I was right.

So, last Saturday as I watched the Australia/New Zealand game, I was somewhat shocked to ‘read’ that there was no energy on Australia winning the game, despite their dominant position with the minutes counting down. Sure enough though, New Zealand scored two late converted tries, and completely against the run of the game, ‘got out of jail’. They won by one point, 23-22.

I now know that most, if not all sporting events are determined before a ball is kicked, hit or touched down.

Even the specifics of individual plays are largely determined. One morning when I was to play a game of cricket, I awoke, and the number ‘26’ appeared in my mind’s eye. 

Visions of Tomorrow

Where there is no vision, people perish. So it says in the Bible, and there is much truth to the statement. As individuals, as societies, as nations and as a collective species we all require visions of the future. For it is our visions which draw us forward.

The kinds of visions that we are exposed to come from three common sources. These are the visions found in education, those delivered by governments and those found in the popular culture and media.

Visions in education and those of governments tend to be similar. They are usually focused upon building a sense of national unity, via developing a sense of shared history. There is typically a national mythology involved. These mythologies, although based in the past, tend to direct the way policy-makers construct visions in the present. If the vision is too disconnected from the past, the people won’t buy it. In the USA, the idea of freedom and individualism is central to the national psyche, so even a slight turn towards collectivism or socialism can cause significant levels of rejection from many people – a Obama has discovered.

In Australia, the national anthem drums into us Aussies: “Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free.” No such sentiments of freedom in the Chinese national anthem, which implores the Chinese people to create a great wall against the enemy. There’s quite a different sense of destiny contained in those stories.

There is a danger when visions fail to materialise. Obama asked the American people to believe in the audacity of hope (dare to dream). In China, President Hiu Jintau put forward the idea of the Harmonious Society. This macropolicy tells the story of Chinese people living together in trust and harmony, and in unity with nature. It even exhorts the value of democracy, believe it or not. Needless to say, the term “harmonious society” has been the object of great derision in China, because the reality and the dream are so vastly different. Whenever someone steps out of line (i.e. challenges the local, provincial or national leaders) the joke goes that they will soon be “harmonised”. Many westerners may not realise that although there is implicit support for the Communist Party amongst most Chinese (if for no other reason than there is no viable alternative), there is also a great cynicism and even distrust of it.

Visions can unite people, but they can also lead to negative consequences, or even disaster. 

Can People Really Read Minds?

In some popular and science fiction movies there are people who can read minds. In What Women Want, for example, Mel Gibson is able to read the thoughts of those around him. In the movie this is an involuntary process. The thoughts just pop into his head. Personally, I think it would have been a far better movie if we could have just seen what Mel was thinking about. Judging by recent media stories, there’s some mighty interesting stuff in there.

In another version of mind reading, usually found in science fiction movies, we have “empaths’ who can get a sense of what people are thinking and feeling. They are a regular part of Star Trek narratives. Empaths can also sense the future, including danger. They may not read minds thought for thought, but they can pick up “the vibe”.

Is there any truth to these tales of mind reading? Can some people actually read minds? Will all people one day read minds, as part of human evolution?

Who Will Win the Future? The USA vs China.

The USA has been the world’s single superpower since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But will China soon usurp it as the dominant world power? Before I try my hand at answering this crucial question, let me sidetrack a little.

I was leafing through the internet a while back and came across an interesting book titled When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. I haven’t read Martin Jacques' book, but as I scrolled down the page on Amazon, a particular piece of text from the publisher caught my attention. It was this:

According to even the most conservative estimates, China will overtake the United States as the world's largest economy by 2027 and will ascend to the position of world economic leader by 2050.

I am a futurist. More precisely, I write in the field of Critical Futures Studies. Futurists like me question things in depth. We like to probe away, and get into the gaps, identify the assumptions, and ask questions that others may not think to ask.

Firstly, there is an obvious factual error in the statement by the publisher.

Digging Deeper For Oil: A Futurist's Perspective

Click on "read more" to see the Midnight Oil Youtube clip - it doesn't come out on the home page for some reason.

Australian band Midnight Oil:  Never more relevant

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been making headlines for the past few weeks. I have been thinking of writing about this for some time, and it has now dawned on me that this issue is a perfect opportunity to invoke one of the very best analytical methods of Futures Studies. Futurists like me are not merely interested in predicting the future. In fact many of us have little or no interest in prediction. Above all, futurists also like to analyse futures, and because the future does not exist yet, the best way to do this is by taking a deep look at the major issues that are effecting the world now. The oil spill is a perfect opportunity to introduce one powerful method by my favourite futurist, Sohail Inayatullah (www.metafuture.org).

 Sohail Inayatullah

Now, I admit I am slightly biased here. Sohail was the supervisor for my doctoral thesis, which I did through the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. Sohail has worked with numerous governments across the world with a process called Causal layered Analysis, or CLA.

CLA is very simple. It involves taking an issue and breaking it down into four levels. These are the litany, the social/system, the worldview/paradigm, and the myth/metaphor levels. When I use the process, I add a fifth level, the Consciousness Level. This is because I feel that the deeper workings of the human mind and the spiritual context of our lives requires a level all on its own. This obviously reflects my own interests as a person and a researcher, and my personal biases come into play at that level.

Taking a look at the Louisiana oil spill using Causal Layered Analysis, some very interesting things emerge.

Killing Bliss in China

 Men armed with metal poles patrol outside a kindergarten in China

At 8.20 a.m. yesterday, 48-year old villager Wu Huanming entered the Shengshui Temple Kindergarten in Shaanxi province in north-east China, took out a kitchen cleaver and hacked to death seven children and two teachers. He also injured eleven others.

Shockingly, it was the sixth such attack in a Chinese primary school or kindergarten in less than two months. The first attack occurred in Nanping, Fujian province, on March 23, when former surgeon Zheng Minsheng, 42, killed eight children and injured five. Then followed four school attacks in April in Guangxi, Guangdong, Jiangsu and Shandong provinces.

The school attacks have all happened in towns or small or medium-sized cities and were committed by unemployed or underemployed middle-aged men. Most had personal grievances that they felt powerless to redress. The attacks have been escalating at an alarming rate, several of them being copy-cat massacres.

 The locations of the recent school attacks

What are we to make of this very sudden shift in Chinese society, which has always seen itself as holding a deep love of children? What does it say about futures within and beyond China?

Piled Higher and Deeper

I'll get to that later... much later  

    On my desk there is a little cartoon which I have drawn. It is a mock newspaper headline, and under it the head of a “grey” alien. The headline reads:

  Aliens deliver first vital message to Earth

    There is a speech bubble emerging from the appropriately tiny mouth of the alien, and the following words are uttered as the first inter-galactic wisdom from our interstellar friends.

    “Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.”

    It’s actually a quote from Timothy Ferris’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week (which I reviewed on 22c+ a few weeks back).

    This statement has particular significance in education systems in many countries. Policy makers and educators set curricula that are often meaningless and irrelevant. They then set about rewarding students who “succeed” in them.

     And they love to pile it on. Take a look at the photo above. I took it at a certain school where I used to work in Hong Kong. This is an actual teacher’s desk; not his second desk, nor the desk in the corner where a teacher might pile all the stuff he never uses. At one time there used to be a teacher at this desk. Then one day he just disappeared under all the crap, and no one ever saw him again.

Sleepwalking Through the Extraordinary

Today’s blog post is based on the introduction of my academic paper “Deep Futures: Beyond Money and Machines”,which you cam find on my web site, MindFutures, if interested. Today's post will tell you a little bit about what I am passionate about as a futurist.

It was Washington DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. A man peeled a violin from his case, placed his hat before him, and proceeded to play six Bach pieces. During his sixty minutes in that place, some 3,000 people passed by, most on their way to work.

Three minutes after the man began playing, a middle-aged gentleman stopped to look for a few seconds, before hurrying on. About four minutes after that, a woman threw a dollar into the hat and continued past. A couple of minutes later, a young man leaned against the wall nearby and listened for a few moments. Then he checked his watch and left. Next, a boy of about three years stopped, but his mother pulled him away. As she dragged him off, he kept turning back to look at the man with the violin.

Similar scenes unfolded as several other children took an interest in the musician, but in every case the parents dragged them on. In total, only six people stopped to listen, most for just a few moments. About twenty gave money, then hurried off. The man collected a total of $32. He finished playing and humbly left. There was no applause, nor any indication his playing had been appreciated.

Yet this had been no ordinary street performance.