This is your Quick Start Guide to all things Remember the Future. Here's what you'll find on this page:
- What is Remember the Future?
- The Vision for This Site
- How to Approach the Future
- What is the Bigger Picture?
- Who is Remember the Future For?
- What is the Sunday Entry?
-C.S. Lewis
What is Remember the Future?
This a public, interactive journal of consciousness created for-and with-fellow technologists, healers, seekers, sages, and imagineers. It’s for humans who don’t assume that any one experience is the whole story, for whom life is a canvas, and for whom time presents adjacent possibilities. This approach does not assume a shared understanding of what consciousness is and why it matters. So, with each Entry, Remember the Future becomes a path that edges our readers towards new ways of knowing what is real. This journal is also an invitation to embrace remembering as a higher order of process thinking, which affords each of us moral and spiritual growth, and the strength, courage and capacity to pursue a future where wisdom germinates in the soil of our collective consciousness.
The Vision For This Site
Along with a growing network of brilliant, generous and compassionate collaborators who inspire each and every Entry, Remember the Future is built with the intention to draw diverse perspectives towards the problem of, and potential solutions to, a crisis of meaning, of wellbeing, and of wisdom. It is intended to be accessible to audiences for free, and to bridge the gap between the theory and lived experience of these complex ideas as they show up in our worlds.
This site is the first home of Remember the Future, where you will find our open source wisdom library, which houses archived Sunday Entries. As readership grows, we would like to periodically transform this stream of content into public reports, product frameworks and organizational guidelines, and explore live collaborative events together with our readers. We’ll also be diving deeper into specific themes with our curated self-guided course offering and e-books.
This is why each Sunday Entry comes with a learning program that prompts personal practice. These are intended to be an invitation to reflect on the processes we rely on to cultivate embodied awareness of these concepts, and how they operate on our lives. In the future, we imagine that this body of work could foster an intelligent machine whose strict purpose is to service human agency and it’s unique ability to imagine our way through time.
How to Approach The Future
I encourage you to take on new meanings for future, beyond those related to time. Let it also represents a framing of mind — a perpetual state of openness, where every moment, and stream of moments, is an opportunity to recognize the inherent magic of being human.
The Bigger Picture
In the intricate cartography of our lives, maps delineate the known roads, guiding our passage through traversable terrain. Signs emerge as beacons, illuminating the path ahead, while parking lots offer respite along our journey. Yet beyond these mapped territories lies the vast expanse of wilderness—a realm of untamed possibility and uncharted exploration. To the modern American psyche, the map becomes synonymous with the landscape itself, blurring the distinction between the mapped and the un-mapped, the developed and the wild.
And so it with other life topographies. Everywhere we experience life, at least some part of it is mediated by digital technology. The screen you’re reading now is a portal to a vast technosphere where human-like avatars collapse the territory into a map, and confuse the two, often with disregard for the boundedness of time. The digital revolution has fundamentally reshaped the way we view our place in the world, and intertwined life with artificial pixels and machine algorithms.
And in the midst of this entanglement, there are souls who become estranged to cultural striving, professional specialization-for whom the norms are not normative-and who turn their minds into the depths of their own inner worlds. These are the explorers and the psychonauts, the mystics, the sages and the forgotten others who transform time into a medium by which human psyches gains admittance to eternal wisdom. These are those who choose to assume existence broadly, and in so doing, embody the transformative capacities of human nature.
And yet, even in choosing openness to life, and in claiming agency for awareness, human potential has limits. Perhaps life itself is the final word. Perhaps each path is unique. Perhaps there is no single route to enlightenment.
With so many professional gurus and divergent belief systems, the information explosion we call the internet can make it difficult to bring meaningful knowledge into a single view. Like the unassembled pieces of a great jigsaw puzzle, systems of thought and ecologies of practice which purport to enhance developmental possibilities are scattered across the intellectual landscape, isolated from one another in separate fields of inquiry. Tossed between chaos and order, we become stuck in states of static equilibrium, uncertain which valley to cross and peak to climb. Without a map, or a sense of the ground, we can’t remember where we are and have no idea where true north lies. We live for the weekends, and begrudge the work we do in those between times. And soon enough, our mantra of “work-life balance,” seduces a new wave of experts to our feeds, each in his turn eager to peddle their idea of what possible is.
And that is why I created Remember the Future.
For nearly 15 years, I’ve traveled in the wilderness, in search of practical guidance, stories of inspiration, creative methods, communities of dreamers and the courage to embrace the totalizing feature of it all: impermanence. This is my attempt to publicly dedicate these efforts to the others who are seeking paths between worlds, who gleam that there is potential that resides within each of us, and who choose to remember.
If you are going to detour away from the default path, as I have, you will need inspiration, encouragement, community, solidarity; a sense that, with every widening of the aperture, the pixels of reality become ever more clear. I think of this effort as space-building, or garden growing, as work that holds possibility for more than passive consumption. I am curiously investigating whether ideas, properly apportioned, interwoven, cross-pollinated, shared, and developed, organized and contextualized, can contribute to agency.
Who is Remember the Future for?
The Polymath
Embracing the diversity of human experience with boundless enthusiasm, the polymath roams the vast landscapes of knowledge, sampling the fruits of every field with insatiable curiosity. They transcend the boundaries of specialization, weaving a tapestry of interdisciplinary wisdom that reflects the kaleidoscopic beauty of the human intellect.
The Ethical Technologist
Guided by a moral compass as steadfast as the northern star, the ethical technologist navigates the ever-expanding frontier of technological innovation with integrity and compassion. They harness the power of technology for the betterment of humanity, mindful of the ethical implications and dedicated to fostering a future shaped by justice and equity.
The Eternal Student
Forever enraptured by the ceaseless dance of knowledge, the eternal student embodies a boundless curiosity that transcends the confines of academia. They traverse the landscapes of literature, philosophy, and science with an insatiable hunger for understanding, perpetually seeking to deepen their grasp of the intricate tapestry of existence.
The Synthesizer
Like alchemists of the intellect, synthesizers distill the essence of disparate ideas, weaving threads of wisdom into cohesive narratives. They traverse the realms of knowledge, bridging disciplines and epochs to illuminate the interconnectedness of human thought, offering insight into the grand tapestry of existence.
The Wild Soul
Rooted in reverence for the untamed beauty of the natural world, the wild soul embraces the call of the wilderness as a sacred invitation to communion with the earth. They roam the forests of their imagination, attuned to the whispers of the wind and the secrets of the soil, finding solace in the primal rhythms of existence.
The Sensemaker
Navigating the labyrinth of modernity with clarity and grace, the sensemaker unravels the complexities of our world to reveal patterns of meaning and significance. They sift through the cacophony of information, distilling wisdom from chaos and offering guidance in the pursuit of truth and understanding.
The Seer
Gifted with insight beyond the veil of the ordinary, the seer peers into the depths of the human soul, discerning hidden truths and guiding souls on the path to enlightenment. They channel the wisdom of ages past, illuminating the shadows of ignorance with the radiant light of divine knowledge.
What is the Sunday Entry?
Sent out every Sunday morning, our newsletter diverges from the typical barrage of trendy distractions vying for attention. In a world where fleeting trends often drown out meaningful insights, ours serves as a weekly sanctuary, offering a curated collection of ideas that resonate with common themes, concepts, and structures, guiding readers to make sense of the complexities of our world.
Drawing from established theories of human intelligence, our approach synthesizes existing frameworks to address contemporary challenges. Just as Hofstadter illuminates the centrality of analogy in cognition, we leverage the power of abstraction to compress and encode information, facilitating efficient idea matching. This process, akin to the brain's quest for maximal information parsimony, lies at the heart of our endeavor to forge connections between diverse ideas, much like the word "shadow" encapsulates multiple concepts.
Each week's entry serves as a tapestry of synthesis, weaving together diverse experiences, practices, thoughts, and emotions to engage the mind, invigorate the heart, and broaden awareness. Through bi-directional phrases, words, links, and spaces intentionally integrated into our narrative, we invite readers to participate in the ongoing dialogue, exploring a multiplicity of perspectives and truths that unfold over time.