Project Vision 21

Someone recently contacted me asking for my help to "see the future with more clarity." This is a businessman who, due to the changes caused by the pandemic, considered it prudent to spend some time thinking about how his business could be part of the new future. But, despite his request, he didn’t really want to see the future with clarity. 

When we speak of "seeing the future" we are not talking, obviously, of any kind of divination or prophecy. We are talking about carefully analyzing the present on the basis of the information already available to see where and in what direction the new future emerges.

There is nothing to guess, but a lot to study. But first you must understand two things: the future is always already here, although not necessarily in its full form; and the future is not a time after the present, but an expansion of consciousness.

Regarding the first point, let’s share this example: the first airplanes have little to do with modern airplanes, except that in both cases they are flying machines. And, to give another even clearer example, the first phones have little resemblance with today’s smartphones.

But the first airplanes, as well as the first telephones, already indicated a certain direction of the development of those technologies and, in fact, many thinkers at the beginning of the last century were able to imagine and anticipate those developments. At the same time, although the examples given are technological, the emerging future is not limited only to new technologies.

And that brings us to the second point: the future is not a time that comes later, but an expansion of consciousness in which consciousness unfolds to embrace the potential for new opportunities for self-discovery and action previously unexplored.

In other words, the future is an open mind. One who has a closed mind, as happened with the man mentioned in the first paragraph, cannot and does not want to see the future and, therefore, only seeks an infinite repetition of the past or a perpetual continuity of the present. But for that person, there is no future because their consciousness has not expanded to see it.

Something said, and for good reason, that the opposite of "love" is not "hate", but "indifference", because in indifference there is not even any relationship between one person and another. In the same way, the opposite of "future" is not "past", but "dictatorship" (in whatever form), because in dictatorship there is no place for the future. Dictatorship is often self-imposed.

Therefore, when I invited the aforementioned businessman to think about a future that is no longer a continuity of the present (which now includes space hotels, trips to Mars, general artificial intelligence, constant pandemics) his answer was none of that is relevant to his business, when, in fact, it is.

Closing our eyes to the future does not invalidate or modify its arrival, but it certainly excludes us from the new future. Therefore, let’s open our eyes.