Project Vision 21

The well-remembered Argentine singer María Elena Walsh introduced us in one of her songs to the Upside-Down Kingdom in which “two and two are three” and where “if you look, you don't see”. It is obviously a fantasy world where the same rules that we follow in our world don’t apply. But maybe it's not just fantasy.

Recently, NASA indicated that its scientists working in Antarctica detected " evidence of a parallel universe -- where the rules of physics must be the opposite of our own."

In this Upside-Down Kingdom, detected by NASA thanks to particles called tau neutrinos, time moves towards the past (from our perspective). At the same time, says the NASA statement, if there were inhabitants in that other parallel (but opposite) universe, they would consider our universe to be the Inside-Out World.

This idea is not new. The idea of a parallel universe has been explored by thinkers, writers, scientists, and mystics for millennia.

But perhaps one of the best representations (full of humor and color) is the episode The Farnsworth Parabox in Futurama, from June 2003, which precisely explores what universe "Universe A" is and, among other existential themes, how fragile every universe is.

Ultimately, the order we see in our universe is nothing more than the chaos we have become accustomed to. And the rules and laws of our universe apparently only apply to our universe, that is, they are "regional", or, to put it another way, they work only within our "bubble", but not in the entire multiverse.

Perhaps the inhabitants of the parallel world are right when, seeing what is happening in our world, they affirm that it is we who are moving in the wrong direction. After all, while we are born to die, they (because time flows in another direction), emerge from death, and live to be born (an absolutely compelling idea.)

But, in addition, in our daily life, we are at a time when, as María Elena Walsh said, our small world is literally upside down, where two and two are no longer three, but whatever the boss decides (as Anthony taught De Mello in The Song of the Bird) and where we look, but do not see.

We watch the news and we read the social media posts, but we don't see reality. We look at the masks, but we don't see the people. We look at the profound and irreversible changes that a virus forces us to make, but we don’t see the opportunity to create a new future and, even worse, we want to return to a nostalgic past that never existed.
Gandhi said it well in his list of the Seven Deadly Sins: we want wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, business without ethics, science without humanity, religion without sacrifice and politics without principles.

We are in a real upside-down world (or society): we have now a great opportunity to move into the future, but we are going back to the past.