Recently, on Tuesday, June 14, I facilitated the first of what will be many Visioneer Laboratories. In a two-hour span, 30 attendees got to practice using their Visioneer capabilities, and in the process the room was lit up with the excitement that a scene of genius – a scenius – creates.
As I’ve explained in my article Are You a Visioneer?, a Visioneer is someone who has long-term vision and can think and see far and wide, is someone who dreams, and thinks of the what if’s and the possibilities, and isn’t detracted by the naysayers and critics.
There have been many Visioneers throughout history, and one of the most famous ones in recent times was Nikola Tesla. Albert Einstein also was a famous Visioneer.
But the truth is, as I’ve pointed out, we are all Visioneers. We all have this capability innate in us. It’s just that it’s not cultivated or used. Like any muscle, you have to use it or lose it, and like any muscle, if you start exercising it regularly, it quickly gets into shape.
We are moving towards an open future, a world predicated on an evolved open culture and open systems – this is the Revolution, the Quantum Revolution, we have in our midst. As we move in this direction, we are being asked to transcend our binary mind and move towards our quantum mind.
It’s a lot we are being asked to do, to transcend our binary mind: on the one hand it will be hard, and at the same time, it will be easy.
It will be hard because to transcend our binary mind means getting past the way our minds are wired, and all the habits and patterns we fall into – habits and patterns that don’t serve us in any way, shape or form. Our binary mind and our binary way of thinking, to see things in black and white terms – that is our default mechanism. When we think in this way, we tend to be provincial and tribal, and believe that others are either with us or against us. This is the way of thinking that has gotten our world in a lot of trouble and caused most of the strife we see.
Yet at the same time, the transcendence of the binary mind is easy, because it just means surrendering to the unknown, to the realization that you may just not know. In a way, it also means just flicking a switch in the mind so that the mind opens up to a new way of seeing. In this way, you stop the preconceptions and judgments and expectations and petty feelings of jealousy and anger and fear, and you open up to something that is bigger than you, yet at the same time part of you: Infinity.
That’s right, you open up to infinity.
Growing up, I was a math geek and loved to play with numbers in my head. I would often close my eyes and ponder the nature of infinity. It seemed so natural and organic, so free flowing, so integral and practical to our existence.
Yet, opening up to infinity is a totally foreign concept for most people. The writer Jorge Luis Borges once said, “There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.”
And the poet William Blake once said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Infinity is real and grounded into our being. Infinity is what drives the world, yet we close up, afraid to face the vast ocean of endlessness that infinity is. And because we close up, we because a caricature of who we really are: we regress and transform into a binary-thinking individual and allow our perception to be clouded with divisions and illusions of separateness, as opposed to perceiving unity.
At its heart, the Visioneer Laboratory’s aim is to coax us back into perceiving unity, to assist us in opening our doors of perception and gazing at infinity once again.
The quest for an open future, for an evolved open culture – towards the Revolution that is in our midst – is easier than you think. And it all comes down to the way we see the world.
Here’s to the Visioneer in each and everyone of us.