Co-Creating the Future: a new age of chivalry

The future, as astronaut Edgar Mitchell once said, is not to be discovered but created. This involves the co-creative partnership of combining ‘right mind’ or ‘right thinking’ with moments of change.

As the Internet increasingly becomes a space where people are becoming the creators, co-designers, and participating in peer-to-peer applications, a new form of complex interconnectivity is forming. This rapid acceleration of social connectivity is fostering what can be called ‘amplified shared knowledge’: knowledge sharing through digital social networks and collaborative tools such as Wikipedia. In effect these are collaborative tools designed to augment human intelligence and are being referred to as forms of an emerging collective intelligence. The term ‘collective intelligence’ can also mean bacterial, hive or insect intelligence; artificial intelligence; the spiritual ‘noosphere’; the ‘global mind’; ecology; and political governance. Whether in biological or social terms, the capacity for what is defined as ‘collective intelligence’ involves the ability to transmit, receive, utilize, and ultimately share, flows of information. It is an attempt to make human groups as conscious as possible of what they are doing together.

In terms of human-to-human connectivity, the transformation into planetary citizenship will be greatly affected by how our thoughts influence one another. How the future may/could be depends to a large degree upon how we ‘think’ and ‘feel’ and ‘believe’ about the future. After all, we are not separate from our environment. It is now quite well understood that we form part of a fabric/field of mind and intention. Fear and negativity poison our environment and tears holes into this invisible fabric in which we are immersed at all times. Fear has always been the principal tool of oppressors; it both dampens our energies and ambitions and deadens our thoughts. Fear degrades us, and insults our intelligence.

Grandfather Stalking Wolf once said that:

If a man could make the right choices, then he could significantly alter the course of the possible future. No man, then, should feel insignificant, for it only takes one man to alter the consciousness of mankind through the Spirit-that-moves-in-all-things. In essence, one thought influences another, then another, until the thought is made manifest throughout all of Creation. It is the same thought, the same force, that causes an entire flock of birds to change course, as the flock then has one mind...

We have an obligation to seed the fields of our human collective intelligence with the right choices, to influence a future we most care about. This is not sugary sweetness; these are the songs for an emerging age of chivalry. Where have all the troubadours gone, we may ask?

They are still here - within the songs that each one of us can sing. This, perhaps, is the essence of Spirit that moves-in-all-things.