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About the book
In this book, we want to share our findings in the unknown territory of human experience that we think is of paramount importance to human evolution for the future. In exploring this new land, we have encountered three phenomena: transformation signals, dynamic skills, and ontological invitations. Currently, we see ourselves as a tributary to those who have already set foot there and come back with remarkable information. Informed by this, we have discovered a unique approach to the evolution of human needs and skills. Our story is about how we can move the world toward healthy progress, with new opportunities for us to learn and develop as individuals and collectives.
There has been no other time in history where human influence has been so strong and visible here on Earth. Regarding the future, great new challenges have appeared on our doorstep that demand societies to change. Climate change, the destruction of nature, and growing inequality are some of the symptoms that all point to a very fundamental problem, which is the way we think and act as human beings.
So, the question becomes ‘How do we as human beings need to change and grow to overcome these issues?’ This is what we are tackling in this book. To address that very question, we need to look at our behavior historically as social beings. We also need some robust tools for lighting the way forward. In particular, we need an approach that is practical enough to give us the direction and guidance for the radical change that is needed.
We have lost the connection to the future and it is high time to get it back. Essentially, our connection to the future relies on the ability to transform ourselves through learning.
Currently, we progress predominantly within the existing parameters of our convictions, belief systems, worldviews, or observational disciplines. This means that everything we develop, create, discover, research, and are willing to experience only enters our conscious perception within these parameters. In other words, we are stuck with the ways we have learned to fulfill our basic needs in the last hundreds of years.
The development of industrial societies meant a huge leap forward in how we learned to respond to this call. In essence, our learning has been based on mastering the fulfillment of our basic needs: food, safety, shelter, self-expression, self-determination, and the ability to enjoy. It is only natural that those principles drive our thoughts, feelings and actions. The management of our basic needs over a long period of development has provided us with a powerful skillset that does just that: securing our basic needs through trying to control, regulate and steer life itself. Managing in this sense also means creating a rather static world view that only addresses our basic need skills. All our actions are based on these deeply engrained convictions.
We will take a historical look at the perspective of learning: How the two great influential forces of how to discern and how to correlate have enabled our learning capacity through the development of sensors, processors and drivers. Moreover, we will explore the role of meaning and the sense of future to our abilities to transform.
As our analysis will show, sticking to our basic needs is simply not enough for the future. It only perpetuates the vicious cycle of people constantly fulfilling and then over-filling their basic needs. 40% of the US adult population is already obese. The average car size car is growing, even if there fewer family members to share them. Simultaneously, global warming is advancing in leaps and bounds. The years of 2015-2018 were the four warmest years in recorded history. Microplastic pollution is spreading all around the world. Moreover, riches are concentrating on ever fewer hands. In 2017, the world’s richest 1% got 82% of the wealth. Wealth in our societies is not cascading in ways that would enable everyone to have their basic needs met.
We seem to be slow learners in seeing the long-term impact of all our technical innovation and developments. We see that short-term benefits are obvious, but in the initial designing phase of products, the long-term side-effects are seldom taken into account.
Even in our personal lives, for instance: the amount of anxiety and stress reducers that people are using to deal with the symptoms of our present way of living, are just taking away the symptoms and have little effect on the cause.
To any mindful observer, something seems to be fundamentally wrong in how we are living our day-to-day lives. We are doing the best we can and still we find it very hard to deal with these challenges. Mostly we come up with solutions that, because they are designed in a similar mind-set as we are used to, in the long-term generated new challenges.
Our claim is that it has to do with our current state of being, which is predominantly focused on fulfillment of basic needs. To get past this, a much more intelligent human behavior has to surface, before we make the conditions for life unbearable for civilization of our size. We need to take the bold step as a human race and get to the next level of how we are and act in this world.
In this book, we will explore a new learning that is in an area that lies beneath or above or outside or beyond our existing learning parameters. We see that all our current and future challenges are pointing towards an upgrade of our abilities. We will introduce the new level of human behavior that we call dynamic skills. Here we will not be locked any more with our self-centered needs, but we will go far beyond them. Moreover, we will describe how to be more driven by the invitations that come from outside ourselves that connect us firmly to the future. We will conclude this book by providing tools how to get connected to those invitations.
In fact, we are already observing this radical shift taking place, though in early stages. In the near future, we hope this change is going to be recognized as a penetrating signal into every corner of our human communities. Our civilization is ready for the next step: The future is calling us and we need to design our actions accordingly. As individuals and collectives, we cannot anymore orientate our actions on the basis of fulfilling our present needs only. Learning to collaborate with future is the real challenge we are facing today. Overcoming this threshold will only happen if we start to perceive and learn the skills capable of taking us past the current challenges into a vivid connection with future. It will ask a lot from our ability to learn, our way of life and our being to support the necessary transformation.
The future is always there if we enable ourselves to let it cooperate with us.
Will you support our work?
Markku Wilenius & Peter Paul Gerbrands