In an interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., described his father, a few days before he was murdered by the CIA, giving him a book inspired by the Stoics, 334BC to 180AD, what does it mean to “do the right thing.” Young Kennedy was fourteen. Recently, Kennedy described his affinity for audiobooks. The current volume being “Alexander Hamilton,” thirty-hours by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow, perhaps the best and most personal overview of the American Revolution, the drafting of the Constitution, and the founding of our American government. Having interviewed hundreds of extraordinary people, when they comment on such works, I dig in.

In addition to several of her award-winning books and papers, including “Restoring the Kinship Worldview, Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth,” Darcia Narvaez, Professor Emeritus at Notre Dame, recommended, “Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief,” by John Lamb Lash, which describes the Indigenous-Pagan reality from the Axial period, approximately 800 to 200 BC, and later, where different groups in the ancient world, Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, Mesopotamian, and others developed codes of conduct and morality.

Laura observed during our interview, “Some see the future before others.” Laura was Aldous Huxley’s wife; Aldous being the author of Brave New World, a vision of the future. Laura and Aldous were friends of J. Krishnamurti, another person who saw the future long before most.

Please write a list of simple suggestions of how an individual, parent, educator, practitioner could make changes to turn the trends you are talking about.
Thanks. Helen

If the example which our behavior exhibits today was the template that would imprint how the next generation, and therefore the future of humanity, will behave, what would you do differently? What will make us change and what kind of change will actually make the difference we urgently need? Just today, on November 26, 2019, another extinction report filled the headlines:

There is the surface challenge du jure, of the moment, and the deeper challenge that created that challenge. We are exploring the root source of our chronic personal, social and ecological dis-ease, that has now turned into crisis. Why humanity has created the mess we find ourselves in, and have been in for thousands of years. As we began; the source of problem is not out there, in society, in our relationships, in the environment. The crisis is in each of us, how we perceive, think, feel, how we treat each other and the world. The deeper challenge is inner, a particular misuse of memory, and therefore structure of thought and our identification with this misuse.

The deeper challenge

The question is; can we use image and information technologies without them infecting us and changing how we perceive, how we feel, what we think about, value and behave? The answer is no, so precede with caution.

Sometime, perhaps 50,000 years ago or more, a relatively thin layer of neurons, emerging out of and covering the ancient sensory-motor and limbic-emotional brain centers, exploded - and along with it memory of the distant past and more revolutionary projections into the future. The capacity to create mental images not presented by the sensory or emotional systems grew like a supernova, including the use of symbols, language and metaphor; a word, for example, standing in place of a thing. So powerful and explosive was this new image-making capacity that it quickly swamped the other systems, filing what we call consciousness with dream-images that were so real that we forgot that we were dreaming. Like a giant snowball of dream-images, once set into motion this capacity grew by one dream image triggering another and another, creating a virtual reality machine unparalleled in the known universe.

If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare. The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.

“Never memorize something that you can look up.” ― Albert Einstein

Ask yourself: “If my child was one of the last living members of the human race, and he or she would carry the DNA memory that would give birth to a new species, what should that memory contain?”

Perhaps DNA holds the memory of 2+2=4 or the Beatles recorded I want to hold your hand in October of 1963, but I doubt it. I place my memory bets on capacity and qualities, not content as data, information or knowledge. Qualities and capacity are those forces of behavior that define our relationships with others, nature and the universe; selfish greed and altruism, empathy and aggression, holistic appropriateness and inventiveness for profit, for example. When considering the value of parenting and education, rather than passing standardized tests and preparing for a job, we might consider qualities and capacities that will serve humanity in its new dawn, and then see that our child embodies these, just in case. Here are a few suggestions to get started: