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Proyecto Visión 21

The challenge of building a new future from an old past

 

Francisco Miraval

During a recent community presentation, one of the participants (a gentleman in his mid-40s) told me, “I like what you are saying and I would like to accept it, but it is not what my father taught me.”

Obviously, I will never ask anybody to stop believing in whatever his/her father taught him/her just to accept what I say. The reason is clear: I will never ask anybody to accept anything I say or teach because whatever I say is, at best, just a provisional teaching.

Regardless, the observation shared by the participant immediately provoked in me the curiosity to know more about the teachings he received from his father, I assumed those teachings to be very important to the point of preventing a man in the middle of his life from accepting new ideas.

I asked the participant to describe some of the teachings he had received from his father and how that teaching helped him to decide what to accept and what to reject. After all, it would be nice to have such a tool at our disposal because, even if the teachings are wrong, the decision-making process will be greatly simplified.

The man did the best he could to share with the group what his father taught him, a mix of traditional religion and ethical values that many of us already accept as guiding values for our own lives.

I felt disappointed. There was no secret (at least nothing he wanted to share with the group). Everything he said we all heard before. There were no revelations nor heresies, just the usual traditional wisdom of loving your neighbor, doing always good things, and every day getting early in the morning to go to work.

After hearing that, I was concerned about what I may have said during the presentation about the emerging future and about transhumanism that could clash with traditional teachings to the point that somebody understand that what I say contradicts traditional wisdom in such a way that he/she can’t accept what I am saying.

I immediately understood that, regardless of what my ego wished to assume, I was not even part of the issue. After all, whatever I may say or teach is mostly if not totally irrelevant. The issue was between the traditional teachings and the emerging future, where it seems increasingly clear there will be no room for those traditions.

In other words, the man at the recent community meeting experienced a conflict between his past (represented by his father) and his future (blocked from his mind because of his past.) Unable to move beyond the past, he couldn’t see the future. But, at the same time, he couldn’t deny to himself that the future is arriving without asking him (or his received teaching) for any authorization.

Should we betray our past so we can build a future incommensurable with that past? Should we deny the future so we can keep the past? Should we simply live paralyzed by our internal conflict?

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