Are We Future Conscious Enough?

There is a great need for fundamental change in our state of awareness and the way we feel reality, especially in terms of ‘futures consciousness’.

Reading John Renesch’s new book ‘The Great Growing Up’ recently, I remembered this part of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘A New Earth’: “You don’t become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.”

Being a human is to be responsible. John Renesch’s new book The Great Growing Up was a reminder of this for me. Those who deeply feel a sense of responsibility as human beings, not just for themselves, but also for future generations, are the main audiences of his new book.

In his last book, Getting to the Better Future, Renesch quotes global thinker and philanthropist Lynne Twist who says: “Taking a stand is a way of living and being that draws on a place within yourself that is at the very heart of who you are. When you take a stand, you find your place in the universe, and you have the capacity to move the world.” Now, he follows this line of thought and offers a roadmap to take this kind of stand in our modern history.

Renesch believes “it’s time to grow up and be responsible as adults for what we have created as adolescents”. I can remember other futurists’ views in this regard like Slaughter (1999) and Inayatullah (2008) who put forward ideas for ‘Critical’ or ‘Disowned’ futures. What differentiates Renesch's book as an outstanding work is a clear roadmap to action designed based on external and internal attractors that could pull us into a historic shift to more sustainable, mature futures.

Renesch has a realistic perspective. He thinks that it’s a responsibility for humans, as the wisest species of living things, to accomplish the mission they are designed for: ‘shaping the future’. He illuminates his ultimate goal in writing the book: “The Great Growing Up is about what Harman calls ‘the good society we all know is possible,’ which is certainly an idea whose time has come. I say this boldly because almost everyone knows we can do better.” Renesch’s solution is a balanced satisfaction of spiritual and material needs of humankind based on a set of futurist values.

‘The Great Growing Up’ asks for the revival of maturity and calls for responsibility to accompany the freedom we can enjoy as adults, not freedom without accountability like so many adolescents seek. In this sense, a new age of Enlightenment is on the way and it “requires explicit recognition of not only what we’ve been pretending we don’t know, but the full recognition of our spiritual nature—our interconnectedness with a power greater than ourselves.”

Authors like Renesch think that it is time to stop thinking about what might happen in the future and start thinking about what we want to happen, about what needs to occur now to bring that desired future about: ‘shaping the future’. Their perspective is based on what we think, say and do for the future. They call for a “universal humanity” capable of “co-evolution with nature” and “co-creation with Spirit.”

In Renesch’s eyes there are real problems with our current established systems. In fact, our world today is infected with problems like: widening wealth gap, failing war on drugs, losing the war on cancer, growing lack of engagement, Economism, but worse than all is a culture of fear and separation that has paralyzed our world today. That culture should be replaced with a new one, a culture of consciousness. Such a culture may be built by the power of thought.

Renesch’s strategy for making a new kind of culture is based on consciousness. He admits: “The reality we experience in the world today is the result of our consciousness. This consciousness is expressed in many negative ways, as the partial list above illustrates. To shift our consciousness we must understand the dynamics of our pathologies. To understand our pathologies we must study them and become somewhat familiar with them so we can recognize them when they surface, which they are almost certainly going to do from time to time.”

It seems that Renesch is seeking for a global “inner evolution”. In this way, he deals with internal attractors and describes a number of them including: transformative learning, the physical sciences and changing views of reality, and growth in collective wisdom.

It is time to transform the way we experience reality. It’s about a responsible future consciousness.

References:
Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming, Foresight, 10 (1), 4–21.
Renesch, J (2012). The Great Growing Up: Being Responsible for Humanity’s Future, Prescott, Arizona: HOHM Press.
Slaughter, R. (1999). Futures for the Third Millennium: Enabling the Forward View. St Leonards: Prospect Media.

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Alireza Hejazi a freelance futurist. He is the founder and developer of “FuturesDiscovery.com”. He is also a member of WFS and WFSF. Hejazi is currently an MA student of Strategic Foresight at Regent University School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship. His works are available at: http://www.futuresdiscovery.com