FUTURE VISION

     Imagine living in a place where daily life and its institutions are organized around the idea that there is one true faith that provides all the answers; that all authority and tradition are a direct result of God's plan; that prayer and ringing church bells are the only way to ward off plague and famine. Imagine a world where almost all intellectual discussions and publication concerns matters of religious doctrine; where hierarchy, inequality, suffering, and everyone's place is preordained by God and cannot be questioned or changed. Imagine living in a world where almost all political power is concentrated in a very small number of hereditary aristocrats who have been chosen by God to wield power as they see fit in this world. This power is especially to be used to enforce religious conformity even to the point of coordinated massacres of other religious sects. Imagine living in a world where, in some regions, religious warfare kills off nearly 50 percent of the populations, and expressing an opinion on the nature of the Trinity might get you burned at the stake.

     Welcome to continental Europe on the eve of the Enlightenment.

     Now imagine that, in the course of about one hundred years, things changed. Now there was an increasingly popular acceptance of the idea that the universe runs according to readily understood laws that do not require the intervention of God; that the application of reason through science could improve the life of every individual in the world, and that every man should have identical legal and political rights. And perhaps the most shocking change of all; the ruling authorities allowed thinkers a great deal of freedom to discuss and spread these subversive notions. (Ken Goffman and Dan Joy, Counterculture through the Ages, p. 138.)

      The Age of Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was just one of the many countercultural movements that have existed and have proven fruitful in the history of the world. In earlier ages, the Taoists, the Zen Buddhists, the Sufis, and the Troubadours of the eleventh and twelfth centuries have all radically changed their realities. Since the Age of Enlightenment, the American Transcendentalists of the early nineteenth century, the artists and writers of Bohemian Paris, and most recently, the Hippies have made major inroads in the collective trip. All these movements have been cultural change agents, catalytic agents that have interacted with the prevailing culture and have helped to create a new and more viable way of life.

      However, there has always been resistance to change, both within the individual and in the general culture. This resistance to change has always created a crisis, a time of confusion and denial, a prolongation of the time of letting go of the old. This "crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." (Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, quoted in Dan Simmons, Olympos, p. 638.)

      Today we are stuck once again between an old and dying way of being and a new and more promising way for us to relate to ourselves and to the larger world within which we all live. This is why today, chaos and strife rule. This is why it is now the darkest hour before the dawn. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...." (From Yeats, "The Second Coming")

      However, as any midwife knows, birth cannot be hurried. It comes when it will. "Times of growth are beset with difficulties. They resemble a first birth. But these difficulties arise from the very profusion of all that is struggling to attain form." (I Ching, Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning.)

      When we do manage to transcend this crisis, when we do manage a synthesis of the present day world culture (the thesis) and the present day counterculture (the antithesis), then we may move on into our future, one that will be the best of both cultures, a new and unique mix of the old and the new.

      This future has to manifest in each and every one of us. Each of us must include within ourselves the best of the current world culture as well as the best of the various countercultures that are influencing the change. In hippie lingo, the straights must find the hippie within themselves, and the hippies must find the straight within themselves. Each of us, in our deepest core of being, must become a marriage of both cultures and the best of what they each have to offer.

      Countercultures are cultural change agents. They are not the new way of being that is coming. We won't all become Taoists or Zen Buddhists or Sufis or Troubadours or Enlightened and Rational Philosophers or Transcendental Ministers. We certainly won't all become Hippies either. When we embrace the change, when we be open to the new that is coming, we will become something new and more viable, a creative mix of all these cultural change agents together with the dying culture in which we are all now so firmly embedded.

      For there to even be a future for the human race, we will have to come to grips with the reality of global warming, and soon, before Earth becomes another Venus. If we wish to survive as a race, we will have to move out into the rest of the Solar System too, establishing a permanent and expanding presence in space - on the Moon, on Mars, on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and especially in the Asteroid Belt. We will have to move all our industrial activities off planet too, going instead to where there are already incredible resources (especially in the Asteroid Belt) and where there is little or no pollution or gravity to have to deal with.

      Here on Mother Earth, we need to turn off our cities, leaving them behind, as we spread out into the rest of the world, and beyond too, into the rest of the Solar System. We need to cut way down on our use of petroleum, using wind and solar power and other energies for our heating and our few but necessary planet-side industries. We have to stop using petroleum for personal transportation, for our automobiles and our passenger airplanes. We need to return to the streetcars, the trolleys, the trains, and the ocean going liners that were always the best way to travel anyway. We will all be healthier too, walking and riding our bikes.

      We must have a worldwide web that is uncensored and freely available to everyone. Either this or we need to develop our natural telepathy. One way or the other, we have to come to see that we are all one on all but our most superficial levels.

      There must be complete freedom to explore consciousness, using whatever means we wish, with a spiritual focus on being open and honest with ourselves and with each other, and on being whole and complete beings - beings centered between our masculinity and femininity, between our minds and our bodies, and between our work and our play.

      Finding ourselves through spiritual exploration, we will again come to trust ourselves and will no longer need to turn to authority. This will lead to less government and less rules. This spiritual exploration will also dissolve all the false hierarchies that exist today based upon the irrelevancies of wealth and power. Behind each of our various hierarchical fronts, we're all just slobs, strangers on a bus, trying to make our way home, like holy rolling stones. (From "One of us," by Joan Osborne.)

     Eugene Marks, Ph.D.