Fabrice's Newsletter #2
This newsletter tries to capture a myriad of topics and commentaries and bring you greater purpose and clarity in your life and the world. My hope is this can inspire you to greater heights of understanding and a create a better future for this world!
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Hi all,
How are you holding up? seriously, how are you? I hope this upcoming week, months, years and decades ahead of you will be filled with full presence. Presence of the strongest pulse to your personal WHY.
I’ve been thinking about the future a lot this week and little bit too much.
What is it?
What are its fallacies?
Where does it live?
First, I have to say that I do believe fundamentally that there is just one giant time in the entire universe that encompasses everything knowable and unknowable. It’s the present moment. It’s the only ‘time’ where all potentials can be accessed if you dare to enter its infinitudes. And its starts with the breath. I’ll get to that a bit later in the manifesto. For all intensive purposes I am speaking of the future here in terms of a western calendar year schema and the revolution of our planet earth around the sun every 365 days or so. You wake up everyday, you move into ‘time’ and you grow older each time.
Ask yourself who controls the future?
Our planet has undergone massive changes on all fronts. From its inception 4.5 billion years ago and most recently its changing socioeconomic and cultural systems from the 1800s, 1900s to now the 2000s. Even in the last decade things continue to accelerated at an immense rate. It seems to have all flown by so fast.
Yet who decides the evolution of our world and its future?
Does it just sorta happen?
Do heads of states, multinational companies or cultural producers decide the future we want?
Who is directing all of us and what direction are we headed?
I feel like i’ve been a pawn in a large big game that I’ve been born into. With pre-set rules, ways of thinking and feeling and moving social and cultural ecosystems that seems to take me to a direction that I have no control over.
What I started to realize that this ‘control’ is solely based on my inability to imagine a future beyond the preset vocabulary and words that were given. Those that were inscribed to me as part of the make up and social contract of this large big game.
The traditional flying cars, artificial intelligence or space exploration and the popular Hollywood movies have defined for me for a long time my visions for the future. But I constantly struggled to related these to my own individual existence, my personal struggles and experiences, my day to day actions, my breath to breath moments and my individual thought.
How do they are inter-relate?
How do I make something so macro part of my micro?
Do I have the power to switch it around?
I believe so.
Mapping out the Future
I think everyone should take significant time to think about the future of our planet. Seriously sitting down once a month. or once a year. Weekly. Daily. Its a necessity. Its a revolutionary act. Its creation directly flowing through us. We desperately need it. Questions to explore.
Where are we going as a species?
What does it take for 7.8 billion humans to work together?
Individually, what about your future?
Where will you be?
What are the lessons you will need to undergo to help you achieve what you want to achieve in terms of your legacy in this lifetime?
What are the things that you can do now with your own two hands? The things you have physical control over.
Everyone should study the future and becomes experts of it. They should actively map it out in a journal, draft a plan, create something new for the world and in their lives. Make a chaotic ripple that seeps out in every direction, first in the mind, then in your life unto your community and all your interactions with the outside world.
I strongly believe that sometimes the shortest path you need requires a small detour. So actively mapping the future and diving into these micro-visions and impulses are so vital. Again, our planet desperately needs you to co-create a better future. We have to be an active participant in this dance. And this is your dance.
Thats why I’ve written this Manifesto on the Future. Its design to steer us towards the future we want and how to get there. It will grow overtime and I invite you to co-create it with me. It will evolve.
We are in an imagination battle
First, I want to give a bit of background as to why studying, engaging and creating the future is so imminent for our planet. Why you must find that future of infinity in yourself and build a personal relationship with it.
We live so much of our lives passively and we often feel helpless into how we can really impact the greatest number of people and the many other species in nature that have faced the brunt of our now destructive yet evolving collective humanity.
We continue to accept the way of life and all its glories so passively. We continue to embrace the past as a dictator of our destiny. We confuse the world for ourselves. Its a battle of the imagination. This is what the future is and what it means and how we can begin to control it and our personal direction. There are many iterations and thinkers I could place here to explain what this means, but Adrienne Maree Brown, Author and Activist does it best in this excerpt from her book Emergent Strategy:
“We are in an imagination battle. Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, radicalized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable.
Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else's capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone' else's imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
The most subtlest forms that moves the future are interwoven through our collective actions and beliefs systems. Think of the particles of an ocean wave in motion. Turning and twisting to some force. There are dire consequences to them. Real lives are effected and unjust realities continues to persist in our world.
Moving and shaping the future lies in our imagination. We have to break free from the pre-set vocabulary and rules given to us. We have to be in our personal lives an observer of the past, not a participant of it.
Its entirely an act of revolution because we take upon ourselves to imagine a new future. One that is more equitable. One that is emergent. One that is inclusive. One that interrogates all that has come before us.
Its expanding this muscle and putting it out to the world. Acting on it. It’s truly about having a level of confidence and courage to believe that we ourselves have a rightful place in co-shaping the entire world. It is in our hands. We must stop hiding behind what society has taught us and move beyond it inside of our minds with our hearts and act with our physical bodies.
We have to believe that we aren’t so tiny after all and irrelevant as the world makes us out to be. That we are capable and are part of an entire web of connections and relationships in this moving wave. That we are embedded in communities and people that we can collaborate with and be in right relationships. We have to believe that we have a say. That we with our minds can live fully, say our piece without fear of being misunderstood.
I always look to Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist and philosopher who wrote the essay “Self-Reliance.” Which lays the foundation and bedrock unto which our imagination can thrive and how we can begin to shape the future we desire. He says:
“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last Sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”
To absolve you to yourself is a key principle here. You have to embrace all parts of yourself in order to fully engage the future and the infinitudes of truth. It frees your imagination from the constraints and shadows imposed by the world. You must rise to the top of this imagination battle happening in your heart, in your mind and your body (the three brains of humanity). This is the truest task in co-creating the future with creation.
Without further ado, here’s the Manifesto —
1st draft: MANIFESTO ON THE FUTURE (August, 2020)
1. The future belongs to those who know their true personal soul mission in just a few words. Its the strongest pulse of their personal WHY.
2. To create the future begins with slowing the monkey mind and quieting the invading world. Those who carry any form of meditation practice breath by breath can heed the visions of unborn realities and discover the infinitudes inside themselves.
3. Systems of the future are biomimetic, vital, collaborative, adaptive, sustainable, self-organizing, equitable, thriving and emergent.
4. The future belongs to those whose minds are syncretic, polymathic and dialectic, such is the destiny of humanity. They have moral imagination. They’re lovers of truth and wisdom and must actively seek to bring their ideas to the world without fear.
5. We are all storytellers. We must actively mine new meaning that warms up in us and in others our natural inclination for beauty, care for the planet, curiosity, affection, friendship and creativity.
6. We must liberate ourselves from the world and its hyperreality. Actively creating space for new evolving symbolic structures in ourselves and in others.
7. Self-mastery, self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-expression, self-invention and self-actualization creates the future.
8. We recognize technology will play an integral role in all facets of the future of human society. Thus, an ethical framework should anchor all such rapid technologies we create.
9. Societies of the future are societies who collectively and actively strive for positive peace, moral imagination and transforming the vicious cycles of violence against the society’s most vulnerable populations.
10. Societies of the future are societies who actively strive to create right relationships amongst its members of its society, and our natural environments and our planet.
Thanks as always for reading. Please share this newsletter if you like it or reply if you have feedback!
In good spirit,
Fabrice