Tomorrow’s today

April 14, 3050 AD

The rain stopped. I saw the clouds, they were breaking up. They were being blown over the mountain by the strong winds. I could sense the rain in my spine. I came to see if my kid can take this. She sat quietly in deep silence, closing her eyes, tears dripping with a smile on her face, in ecstasy. The wind is strong and cold now. It might tear down some trees. We both knew the next rains were a few years away. She loved rains. She felt every droplet. She smirked when she felt the polluted ones, the one that had gathered over a hundred years of Anthropocene.

She had trained herself to deal with them when she was only one. She would not react, she stored the impurity separately avoiding affecting her sensing abilities. Her mother had programmed this well before she was conceived.

She was strong in handling symbolic conceptions. She had picked up Sanskrit herself in her second year while playing with friends nearby. She was good at sensing. She could easily dissolve her symbolic operations and shift herself to a full-on sensing unit. As soon as she closed her eyes, she dissolved uniting with the rest of the matter in equal parts. I struggled over many years to get there, but she is good for her age and I am happy for her. I rushed to her as large atmospheric events, energies sway and you never know how large the impact can be.

She seems to be stable and enjoying. Let me wait.

(Long Silence)

Closing her eyes, Purvi asked, “What happened then?” (In Sanskrit). I waited until she managed her memory and curiosity. Now I was sure, she wanted to know. “Hmm, it is a long story! I love talking about it, but I will tell my view of it, you can gather your facts later”. She said, “Sure, this is nothing new, you always do that”.

“Those were the days when people struggled. They tried understanding existence with their intellect but failed. They struggled to get out of their own symbolic world. Few felt the need to experience existence. Few handfuls.”

She said, “That’s ok, we were learning then I guess”. “But at what cost?” I asked. “You see we created countless tools to get a sense of nature but failed, each time we used this combination of intellect and prop to know existence. people then ended up inventing and writing large amounts of texts, exploited nature and ended up paying for it for the next hundreds of years. She interrupted “Papa, please! You are rushing and adding negativity”.

“ No dear, just that I get attached to this past, I feel the pain. We as a race suppressed our emotions for many years in an illusion to survive and have a vague idea of life. You see there are many stories in time. We believed God created the world in the early days and believed so for a few hundred years, we created religions then. But the main thing I feel that we discovered was an ability to communicate with each other in agreement. The invention of language was the one which made all the difference. We could co-ordinate mass ideas with language. And writing made it exponentially big to reproduce. We could build faster.” She sat quiet, on a floor straight with her spine vertical. She was beginning to open her eyes wider. She saw right through my eyes to sync our conversation, now I need not talk, I could just sync thinking.

I hesitated, asked her “Will you please not sync minds, I prefer to talk, which I know is not efficient but I want my reflective memory to get info randomly.” She smiled “OK!, you seem to be very touchy today”. “You were talking about language, I like Sanskrit, its quick, complete and error free. One can enjoy time better” I said “ I know, I was glad when you picked it up when you were two. I remember the first day you uttered the word OM, you did fluctuate most of the energy around. The kitty, birdies, and reptiles came running towards you with some new excitement. Do they speak Sanskrit too?” She chuckled “ Papa, they sense it many times faster than you do, you are slow”.

Resting back, I was eager to continue…“Trade and language dominated the early days and religion lost its ability to capture peoples imagination about God towards the tail end of the 20th century. Also in parallel, you know foragers of the first migration pocketed in forests lived with the close proximity of nature, till they met the self-proclaimed new civilization. In most conflicts, collective symbolics dominated sensorial tribes. They had stealthier tools and were merciless. Symbolic world captivated mankind for thousands of years. The idea of God was exploited to control. The experience of God was never talked. The language was instrumental in throwing disastrous symbolic nets churning stories of mythology to science leaving no one. It took each one of us on an illusionary journey of fear to pleasure.” She paused me “ Papa, wait this is going nowhere, you are mixing so many stories yourself. Let us go slow, I am really interested here about everything. Why did this happen? Its simple to see symbols create conflicts but why did they build an entire civilization based on it?. Well before that, what about children? How was their life?”

“Kids”. I closed my eyes for a moment. “ You see kids those days were not seen as a sacred life. It was natural to get attached, pamper, get emotionally entangled till one day they realized they flew away like birds. Adults saw them as their own property. They exercised their sense of ownership. They trained them via schools. Schools were centers of learnings as controlled by adults. Kids were forced to learn information gathered by them. She said, “ You mean they were not allowed to experience life themselves? “. “No, very early on kids got exposed to the sound of language at home, letters at schools, adult concepts too soon. They were not allowed to flower on their own. Imagine a tender kid just beginning to sense light, shadow, touch, air, water, plant and so on, it was intercepted with language and noise of adults. You see, this cumulated cultural world was too noisy for the children to develop sensitivity on nature or existence. They just lost their powers.”

She got up and walked around to see outside. The rains were beginning to pour again. She felt deep happiness as she caught the droplets in the shape of beads, cubical, conical, patterned in various shapes. The droplets started forming shapes as she imagined. Her heart signals and water seemed to connect and dance in harmony to create something together. I had not seen this closely. I am beginning to see her interests now with water. She has learned this on her own. She smiled turning back at me showing off her new thing. I wondered if I am stuffing too much of my ideas of the past but she seemed to look calm and confident to take my stories for days. She said, “Papa continue”. I said “ You see my views are biased. Every action in the past must have had its reasons, compulsions, constraints but I do feel sad about those times. We as a race had suppressed our emotions in an illusion to survive and have a vague idea of life. Not everything was bad as I project, there were pockets in the past where many people tried playing with the mysteries of the existence. They were few though. Early sages, wandering monks, devotional singers, mystery obsessed artists, scientists, compassionate individuals and so on. But very few, most of them did not go to schools. (Chuckles).”

“At the end of 20th century, we have moved on from god created the world (propaganda of religions) to symbolics of sciences. Science painted that existence is a result of events of matter, energies, vibrations and forgot that we are part of it. Few clever ones were able to tap and exploit these observations. We discovered new ways to handle materials, electricity, engines, DNA, Computers, Internet and used them in million ways in the form of products and services to comfort us… defining a new Anthropocene epoch.” She said “that’s quite a word, guess was invented at the same time. What were they doing? I mean daily, how did we spend our days?”

“You see, It was an era of rapid large scale building of systems. It was better than the earlier ages where people killed each other for resources. Most adults spent the prime years of their lives building or supporting any building activities in one way or the other. In exchange, they got money, an abstract concept and an agreement that helped them to get basic necessities of survival. They worked more than half of their lives doing this. They trained their children also to do the same in a fear of competition. In this mass creations, people benefitted unequally. Some became rich and some poor. But these terms made no sense as they were based on physical incomes and not emotional. To build they created professions, fueled by money. They created political, economic, technological systems to track everyone and measure every individual worth towards a vague goal of progress. They ended up creating a complex set of codes to live together which they could not handle. They wasted years fixing it till they realized the foundations were based on weak symbolic constructs. They expected computers to fix things for them using their intelligence. They called it AI. Well, it didn’t work either, after all, it was constructed on real-world symbolics.”

“They tried many things but were unable to collectively help each other in creating a harmonious world. Intentions, abilities, the pace of material growth were not equal, worked in patches, making it difficult to reflect on holistic outcomes. By the end of 21 century, they were divided by countries, economies, belief systems, ideologies, assets, technologies, the biology of their bodies and so on but controlled by few large corporations.”

Purvi sensed my exhaustion. She went inside to get me some boosters. I gulped in a couple of it and felt relieved. I paused. My mind had processed a view of my past in symbols and had consumed my energy, the booster monitors had picked the signals and beeped. She saw my excitement and how I was getting caught in my thoughts narrating this whole episode. She sat next to me, transferring her calm. I was even more relieved. “ I heard we used to eat,” she said. “ I wonder how it might be, was it good?, I know you are going to give me another episode, before that how do you feel?” I said, “ I am fine, feel better”.

“For thousands of years, we ate anything which had a life. At the end of the 20th-century food had become a fancy pleasure. Cities had turned into restaurants feeding a million taste buds with cuisines. More people died of food-related issues than wars during this time. After 2000 years of agrarian systems, we moved into processed foods, global distribution supplying food to even the remotest of people. People spent on health, nutrition, fitness, hospitals, education because of the food. It was crazy. We thought that the food provided energy then. People used to get hungry every few hours, die when stopped eating. So daily routines were around these rhythms. Food, work, family, interests, events or friends. Lifestyle overall was pretty crazy, fragmented and reactive mostly. Purvi interrupted “ Papa I am kind of getting all these things, I know most of the facts. When did it start getting better? “

“We started realizing when climate started acting weird. It killed a few million people in the latter half of the century. Few knew all along but were ignored due to vested interests. You see its hard to stop a running machine which is fueled continuously right?. Also, we started seeing its side effects when people started losing their sensing abilities fully. They no more could experience anything anymore. They became like vegetables. More and more cases in millions were recorded and this created a fissure in the machine which later collapsed. Many tried fixing it. They created Cyborgs, robots, inserted boosters in blood, hacked the mind with neuro-machines, invented pills for emotions, traveled to other planets and so on. Nothing worked. We got tired. We realized that intellect cannot lead the way towards harmony and unified feeling of existence. It was not an efficient process. It had failed so many times. And then you the rest of the story.”

Purvi noticed a cloud of smoke from a far off hill. Smoke rose up into the sky touching the thick clouds. The rain has stopped. It is pleasant. We started getting the smoke data. It mixes locally to tell you how clean was the rain. Today, it says mostly clean. It says the contamination extract is around 200 years old, carbon from automobiles I guess. Purvi said “ Papa, the air is from the north, it has flavors from the Siberian jungles, see. It smells good.

image credit: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2018/08/19/from-the-anthropocene-to-the-anthropo-scene-long-read-book-review/