There is a future. There is faith in a future. It will exist. The question is how and why and what pressure does the belief put on the imaginative thought of such a thing. That is a responsibility for a sentient human being but I am inclined to believe that it is the action of the moment, the act of the present, the thousand and one details and activities that present the foundation for such a thought. This is why all those "simple" attributes are so important. We keep, however, the "big thought" in mind. For instance:

(1) The best use of technology. Its uses have been divulged over the past several generations, revealing some good, some bad uses but as yet technology has not appeared as "pure". There is no pure relation to it because when it appears it is immediately fit into some use and so either conforms to the use or extends the use under its own pressure. The car didn't "bend" the environment to its use, it was the other way around. Cars drove along horse trails not paved roads. When people speak of a "technological world" they are speaking to the fact that each new technology is plunged into some use without too much thought. Many people are eager to take the technology and use it until a good fit is found. That commits the culture to technology and commits the people to all the tedious learning curves necessary to understand the new, complex technology. This is either an unconscious prejudgment on the part of society that technology is automatically good or technology has successfully molded the society to its own way. The star is always technology, the man or woman is merely a useful cog. It's tied into the psychology the victim /victimizer, one of the more recognizable tropes we live with. We raise the question but can't answer it.

It may be as simple as this: Those who benefit from technology and those who are oppressed by it create the maddening divisions that reflect conflicts within the self. Divisions exist everywhere from the single individual, through the family, through the community, through the nation, state, and world. These divisions occur from decisions that the individual, family, community, etc makes. These decisions are protected in various ways. They become a power struggle and spawn other decisions. So these divisions do, in fact, become the reality. In a mystical sense everything must play itself out and see the light of day. Nothing will be hidden. This seems to be the law of nature. It may take 2000 years to catch up to but there it is. That which is internal will become external. It is a generalization and what is important to note are the pressures under which that "externalization" takes place because there is no monolithic state of the "internal."

The "external" informs the internal just as much as the other way around. In the last several generations we see that when the internal has been "weak" it adapts to the external. It is intimidated by the external circumstances and the adaptability of other "weak internal selves" who, in their turn, create the atmosphere of adaptability. Just as in religious periods of time, when the internal was built up and protected by dogma and belief, the budding external creations of science and technology were scorned and shunned.

We are in an age now when the internal is weak and pulled apart by a hundred forces. It is devastated by its impotence in the world; crushed and humiliated by a world that leers and taunts its eternal questions. There has been healthy reaction to this in the past twenty years. Youth has the instinct that favors the purely human. Then again it also has a shadow that would hide in the great powers of the world without understanding them.

The one advantage that the "internal" has: is it can neutralize the external by forms of thought. It can create breathing space for itself and then move intelligently in the world of objects externalized out of its "old self." The "internal " aspects recognize themselves quite readily in the environment. That is the great tension created between itself and the world about it. It recognizes the environment as an "old aspect" of itself and sees its own desire to grow pinioned by this old aspect. That is where confusion comes into being.

1987

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