The Future We Deserve is a collection of 100 essays from people of all walks of life discussing our world from amazingly different perspectives. Utopia or oblivion, plenty or famine, freedom or slavery? We do not know, but we do know that there is a vital thread of insight which emerges when people think together about what they really want, what matters most to them, and how we are all going to live in just a few years.

In The Future We Deserve, authors pick a single facet of the future, and discuss something close, personal and real to them. There's little time to extrapolate in 500 words, pieces are short, direct and powerful. What emerges from this practice is an immediate and visceral sense of the immensity of the forces which shape the future, and the diversity and complexity of the possibilities. Each potential future discussed is an island, and whether they are compatible with each-other in some wider scenario is not the point: rather, each possible, plausible future stakes out a new piece of the terrain. All of this could happen.

An amazingly dense read, The Future We Deserve will stay with you long, long after you read it. The authors regularly discuss the pieces in the book, and are still learning from each-other, and expanding their understanding.

Deep Lessons by Alan Chapman

The biggest contribution we can make to the world is to recognise that the deepest and most profound experience available to us - whether through recollection as a memory, as something unfolding for us in the present, or as something we wish to engage with in the future - is not something to cling to, cultivate as a permanent state, escape into or regard as a panacea, but something to learn from.

If we approach our inner lives with respect, then we must acknowledge a taxonomy of deep and profound experience, and therefore a correspondence in the depth of our opportunity to learn. To engage with the unfolding of deeper and more profound experience is to open the door to learning the most profound lessons of all. Not everyone does however, and we have seen this failure over the last three thousand years across the globe.

Should we compare and contrast a given current personal problem with that moment of profundity, we can see how our current approach to self, each other and life fails to account for a deeper consciousness of the Way Things Are, let alone reflect it in thought, word, emotion and deed.

To what extent are your problems due to a view of the world and a set of values based on assumption, speculation, hand-me-down bias and appearance, rather than on the (for some) fleeting insight into the nature of each and everyone one of us?

We each share the possibility of deep and profound experience; but how many of us are willing to understand it as best we can and learn from it?

We are each capable of pronouncing on the fundamental nature of reality; but are we also willing to consciously address our habits and behaviours in light of that data?

We can develop our morality and shape our personal lives to reflect the Truth; but to what extent do we examine the culture, society and infrastructure that we participate in and perpetuate?

The Future We Deserve is not one where every individual is enlightened, but one where everyone benefits from the lessons learned; it’s an emerging vision of a civilisation built on and informed by what it means to be a human being in the deepest and most profound ways, where our life long education system encourages exploration of our inner lives and the testing of our personal views against our own direct experience, where the inherent problems of a world view at odds with the world itself are recognised and consciously addressed in that same spirit of discovery, and where our organisation and infrastructure both locally and globally are no longer informed by a paranoid and fearful view of each other and reality.

I don't know what that looks like yet; but I suspect we'll need sunglasses.

While I haven't skyped with Alan yet, I did contact him and at least he was open to doing a skype/teaching session in the future. I will say both him and Hokai seem to have low internet profiles, which is a shame because like myself I am a fan of them. I have Alan's and Duncan's old books. I might write an essay from one of thoses books if I get free time, although tbh I am so dammed lazy as of late so I dunno and I suspect his opinions have changed in the past few years so it might also be misleading as well.