virus: Future-Remembrance Day (11:11:11 11/11/11)

KMO (kmo@c-realm.com)
Sat, 12 Dec 1998 11:07:31 -0800


Those on the TOTD list will most likely recognize the name Robert
Grudin. He is the author of "Time and the Art of Living." David, your
idea for Future-Remeberance day resonates with the major themes in
Grudin's book. Here's an excerpt:

"The mind projects its joys and woes so powerfully onto the face of time
that changes in mood can all but create new temporal worlds. The
negative or painful emotions - guilt, anger, envy, greed, etc. - usually
involve a fragmentation of time, a sense of isolation in the present or
fixation on some aspect of the past or future. The sunny emotions -
admiration, generosity, love, courage, etc. - foster a sense of
continuity, of time extended and shared. Calm people swim freely into
the future and speak of it as if it were part of them. But those who are
hopeless for reasons of age or grief or illness barely use the future
tense at all; and for frightened people, the future can shrink to almost
nothing, can seem like the rippled surface of water between them and
some menacing promontory. Opportunists live in a tiny glimmer of the
present, intent like small predators on the next morsel or trap. Win or
lose, time is for them a straitened and barren dimension. But for happy
people, at the opposite extreme, the present is so voluminous, so
inclusive of the full self and so indivisibly coherent with past and
future, that time in the usual sense does not pass for them at all. They
are at one with the dynamics of nature: time's motion is implicit in
their own."

For those of you familiar with Terrence McKenna's timeline, you'll note
that 11/11/11 is one year, one month, and one day before the eschaton
(singularity). Things ought to be changing pretty quickly by then. It's
hard to imagine what our circumstances will be by that time, but we can
certainly formulate a cohearant image to the kind of people we would
like to be by then.

Take care, all.

-KMO

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David McFadzean wrote:
>
> Here's an original (as far as I know) meme that may be easy to
> trace on the internet for experimental purposes:
>
> Future-Rememberance Day. Where will you be and what will you be
> doing on Nov. 11, 2011 at 11:11:11am? Who will you be with? What
> will you look like? What will you *be* like? Envisioning your
> future self may be an interesting and useful thought experiment.
>
> --
> David McFadzean david@kumo.com
> special agent http://www.kumo.com