Mind Meld 88 | Shadow Potentials with Michael Garfield

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Writer, musician, artist, and Future Fossils host, Michael Garfield returns for another technodelic tete-a-tete on the future, evolution, personality cults, the angelic/demonic potential of technology, Bitcoin and many more musings!

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Sometimes the line between visionary and madman is pretty thin, maybe even nonexistent aside from the result. A visionary succeeds, a madman fails.

Let’s break it down –

What is a  visionary? A visionary is someone who sees the world differently. A visionary summons up a harmony of self-belief, unique thoughts, novelty and tenacity in order to birth their vision into consensus reality.

So what does that have to do with a madman? Don’t madmen also see the world differently? Don’t madmen also have unique and novel thoughts? I say the madman and the visionary share more features than not.

So perhaps a portion of these rockbottom-dwelling madmen who’ve been booted to the fringes of society were but a hair from being visionaries themselves. Perhaps they just lacked a small piece of the puzzle or the timing wasn’t right. On the other hand, I’m quite sure there are a lot of crazies at the top of the pyramid (leave some coke for the rest of us Steve).

It scares me a little to be honest, because even if these examples are extreme, what if the difference between maturing into your ideal visionary-self and total failure is a decision that seems arbitrary at the time?  Let’s put it into current zeitgeist terms – What if you had 78 Bitcoin and sold them when the coin’s value hit 10 dollars? (I know a guy…).

Small decisions could change your life friends.

My point isn’t to lose sleep over it, after all, we are dealing in extremes here. What it comes down to is mindfulness. Engaging with your decisions, really envisioning a visionary-self so that you can identify the actionable steps you need to take to get there.

I always do this. I wind up thinking about the future in 50 different ways when I talk to my man, Michael Garfield.  He’s a multidisciplinary creative and of the most well-read fellas I know. He’s turned-on to all the tasty future-ontology. Whenever we get together, dare I say, original thoughts are co-created.

MUSINGS IN THIS MIND MELD –

• Picking your battles and spiritual materialism

• Tomorrow’s monsters and saviors are two sides of the same coin

• The next massive step in evolution won’t be biological or individual, it will be a network

• Squeeze the teats – catastrophism, gradualism and intelligence

• Dr. Bruce Damer’s origin of life research and Ken Wilbur’s spiral dynamics

• Humans are masters at symbol magic – creating arbitrary information nodes that gain consensus then become entrenched in culture

• Looking at human behavior in hindsight creates problems

• We think of evolution in terms of winners and losers, but maybe it’s all one entity rearranging itself?

• Can you cherish the individual, but understand we live in a network-wide intelligence? Where’s the balance?

• Consensus reality is overrated, doesn’t exist reality is only going to weirder and muddier