How much time have you wasted staring out of the window
today? If you want to be productive, then the answer should be – a lot!
Freud dismissed daydreams as infantile wish-fulfilment, but
now we know they actually make us more creative and productive. Daydreaming
allows the unconscious to come up with solutions to problems, often while we’re
busy doing something boring, like the washing up or our day jobs. One study has shown that our minds wander 47% of the time while we’re awake. (It’s probably
higher in my case, especially when I’m meditating 😉)
Daydreaming is usually seen as a waste of time. We’re
supposed to be efficient, hard-working cogs in the machine, not idling our
lives away on silly dreams. Our culture values hard-nosed realism and objective
facts. If something can’t be measured and defined in strictly logical terms,
then it doesn’t exist. Dreams and imagination can’t be pinned down – they’re
not ‘real’ – so they don’t matter.
Many of us are discouraged from using our imagination at
school, where the focus is on remembering facts and figures, and passing tests.
We worry about how literate and numerate our children are, but ignore their
dreams.
Everything starts in our imagination
The devaluation of imagination is one of the many blind
spots of our materialist culture. Limiting ourselves to the facts and what we
already know means we can only deal with familiar situations. This way of
thinking assumes the future will be more or less like the present. But we have
no idea what the future will bring. The only way to see where we’re heading,
beyond the immediate horizon, is to imagine it.
Everything that we have created or achieved, was imagined
first. To change a situation we must imagine alternatives. To overcome a
challenge we must imagine new possibilities. Our dreams and hopes for the
future give us something to aim for and a direction to move in. And when we hit
obstacles or experience setbacks, a vision of the future can inspire us to keep
going.
These achievements were once dismissed as hopeless dreams:
- The ending of the slave trade
- Women having a vote
- An African American as president of the United States
Okay, so we still have slavery, and women are still abused
and oppressed even in countries where they have the vote, and young black men
still get shot by white policemen for no reason…
We have a long way to go before our imagined world matches
the ‘real’ one.
Three Stories, Three Futures
In part one of this series (Spiritual Revolution: The Story
of Our Time) we looked at three stories that are shaping our world today:
Business As Usual; The Great Unravelling; and The Great Turning. Each of these
stories imagines the future in a different way:
Business As Usual
sees the future as one of continuing growth. The world looks the same as it
does now, perhaps with a few tweaks to keep the liberals happy, like better
healthcare or faster broadband. This version of the future is delusional and
betrays a failure of imagination (and common sense). If you don’t understand
why, read this.
The Great Unravelling
sees the future as one of terminal decline. As climate change takes hold,
civilisation will collapse and our world will descend into a dystopian
nightmare of police states, absolute surveillance, starvation and misery. A bit
like North Korea, but probably worse. This version of the future seems more
certain every day. Need convincing? Read this.
The Great Turning
sees the future as one of sustainability and hope. It recognises the fears and
potential reality of The Great Unravelling, but is willing to work to prevent
it. This version of the future seems unrealistic and impossible, but is it?
You may say I’m a dreamer…
The consequences of doing nothing about our current
predicament (i.e. staying with Business As Usual) are horrifying and will bring
about the end of civilisation as we know it. Industrial society will breakdown
at some point anyway, either because the economy collapses when we hit the end
of growth, or because climate change overwhelms our ability to adapt. This
could happen sooner than we think.
How can mere dreams help us here?
The only sensible course of action is to transition into a
more sustainable way of living together on this planet. To do this, we must
first imagine the future and believe it’s possible. Our vision must be
compelling and inspiring enough to keep us motivated when things get tough (and
it’ll get extremely tough). We must really want
the vision to happen. It isn’t enough to just think about it. The vision, and
the intention behind it, must have emotional heft. In other words, it must be personal.
“Because we can never know for sure how the future will turn out, it makes more sense to focus on what we’d like to have happen, and then to do our bit to make it more likely. That’s what Active Hope is all about.” – Active Hope
Getting Practical
It’s important to find a vision that is personally inspiring
to you. Listen for the vision that calls to you most strongly and resonates
with your particular blend of personality traits, strengths and weaknesses. It
makes no sense to force yourself to do things you don’t believe in or that feel
wrong to you, even if they may be right for someone else.
The following process of finding a vision can be applied to
anything, not just saving the world! Whenever you need to make an important
change in your life, you can imagine solutions before you try them out. A
practice called ‘imaginary hindsight’ may be helpful here: you approach a
problem by imagining that it’s already been solved and then look back to now
from the imagined future.
Taking this approach, the solutions you come up with
will be more creative and detailed. You also get the added benefit of knowing
what your future achievement feels like and this can help to keep you motivated.
There are three stages to finding an inspiring vision:
- What?
- How?
- My Role?
Start by looking at a specific situation and imagining what
you would like to see happen. Don’t allow yourself to be put off by thoughts
like: it’s not possible, that could never happen in a million years, and so on.
Next, work backwards from your vision of the future to discern the steps needed
to get you there. Note the various possible paths by which the steps can take
place – there’s usually more than one way forward in any situation. Finally,
work out what you can do to help the vision come about.
For example: a vision of a life-sustaining society might
include things like clean air, renewable energy, processes for dealing with
conflict, lifestyles of voluntary simplicity, etc. For each of these
possibilities, you can break it down further. So to achieve clean air you would
need fewer cars and trucks, no incinerators, scrubbers on smokestacks, more
renewable energy investment, more concern about the health impacts of air pollution,
etc. Again, each of these ideas can be broken down into steps. So to get fewer
cars and trucks you would need bicycle lanes, pedestrian malls, higher fuel
prices, more public transport, more carpooling, etc.
You can keep going with this, breaking each component down
into steps, until you find something you can act upon now. An obvious
possibility for the above example would be to pledge to use your car less, to
walk more or take public transport, use a bicycle, organise a carpool at work
or for your child’s school, etc.
On their own these actions may seem trivial, but embedding
them within a larger vision and seeing how they contribute towards building a
better world, can motivate you to make the necessary changes to your own life.
There’s no guarantee that your vision will become a reality, but when you allow
yourself to be guided by hope it makes that future more likely.
We are all part of a larger consciousness that is dreaming
us into being. There is a deeper intelligence at work behind our current
crisis, and when you catch an inspiring vision you are being called to take
action on behalf of that intelligence. We will live together, or not at all.
In the final part of this series we bring our imagination
down to earth in Learning to Fly: How we can change the world
