To positive futures

YES! is a window to positive, creative, views of the future. It is a portal for exploring radical possibilities. Anyone can step through it to undertake diverse journeys of discovery and reflection. This could mean a virtual glimpse of an African organic farm, reflections on cyber consciousness, musings on the absurdity of confusing money with wealth or the efforts of cultural creatives.

These efforts are rooted in the conviction that humanity is in the midst of a historic transition. Amid the deep social and ecological crisis of our times, there is evidence of new, hopeful understandings among millions of people. For many, this means a need to reaffirm our relationship to the non-human world, to each other, and to the spiritual centre of each individual, says a team of activists called the Positive Futures Network.

Yet, people who have felt that understanding often, also feel isolated, overwhelmed and uncertain about how to contribute to such processes. So the Positive Futures Network was set up in 1996 as a nonprofit organisation based in the state of Washington, USA. Its purpose is to enhance the power of people working to create a more just, sustainable, and compassionate future by increasing their public visibility, their sense of interconnection, and their access to visions, tools, stories and techniques for change.

This is done partly through YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, which combines social and political analysis with news about activists in the USA and across the world. Many of their stories report on similar actions in different places which reveal patterns showing the potential for significant social change. Let us take a glimpse at some of the terrain covered by YES!

For example, a recent issue of the journal carried a detailed article titled "India's Silent but Singing Revolution," about the Swadhyaya community, which involves millions of people in Western India. The term swadhyaya means knowledge or discovery of the self. The founder of the Swadhyaya community, Pandurang Shastri Athavale, refuses to call it a movement and describes it instead as simply a stream of thought and consciousness. The article in YES! describes Swadhyaya as a revolution through patience and humility and sees in it a redefinition of individual happiness and societal progress, a world of relatedness lost in modern times.

YES! balances such reporting on ground level organisations with reflective articles on some of the urgent quandaries of our times. For example, is the fantastic boom of the Internet good news or bad news? Will life online reduce us to virtual human beings - isolated, dehumanised adjuncts to machines - with e- commerce unleashing another wave of consumerism?

Some emphatic answers are provided by a writer who delves into the realm of cyber consciousness. Jean Houston, of the Foundation for Mind Research, shows how the Internet is a fulfillment of the predictions made in the mid-20th Century by Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist and mystic. Chardin is famous for his idea of the earth growing a noosphere, a vast thinking membrane that would one day be the living unity of a single tissue that would contain all of our thoughts, our dreams, and even our experiences.

Teilhard has become virtually the patron saint of many who see a vast evolutionary and spiritual potential in the Internet. Among them is Jean Houston, who writes in YES! that just as spiritual practice loosens the boundaries of one's reality and helps us to perceive the interconnectedness of all beings, traveling the energetic byways of the Internet leads to a similar stretching and loosening of the membranes that traditionally divide cultures, languages, sciences, religions, nations, races. Every time we log on, we participate in the creation of the global mind-field. The planet is becoming selfconscious of all its parts through ourselves.

True, the Internet also gives unprecedented opportunities to criminals and purveyors of pornography. But, Houston argues, this cannot undermine the enormous positive potential of Net technology which is restoring us to the more ancient and organic principles of discontinuity, simultaneity and multiple associations. We now look for flow patterns rather than serial cause-effect explanations.

In a sense, this is the essence of what moves a group of people who are being called Cultural Creatives. This is something new. It doesn't fit the standard categories of activist, or right- thinking church people, or political liberals. These Cultural Creatives are already creating lots of social inventions that are going to make a new world, not just reshuffle old political programs says Paul Ray, co-author of a recent book titled Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World.

These are people who are serious about restoring the ecological balance and support the slowing of business growth in order to save the planet. They are also serious about women's issues, peace, civil liberties and personal inner growth. Ray and his co- author Sherry Anderson estimate that such people now constitute about a quarter of the American population. Their research shows that across the world, 70 to 90 per cent people regard nature and the environment as having sacred qualities and as under threat. For all practical purposes, that's unanimity. Its quite stunning, says Ray, in an interview with the editor of YES!

And yet, most of these people are still not fully aware of the potential of their collective strength. Anderson suggests that this is because we dont have mirrors in the media that have been able to show us our own face and our own promise, and so we imagine that we're almost alone. And that's why magazines like YES! are so important to Cultural Creatives. We have to have places where we can have discussions, do this kind of exploring, see what we value, put it all on the table, and see what's possible.

This ever-expanding realm of the possible, on the pages of YES!, covers everything from spirituality to the politics of climate change to "economics as if life matters", local currencies and the intensive street protests against the World Trade Organisation. Here is a detailed picture of the world-view of those who, over the last one year, have organised vociferous street level protests against economic globalisation at meetings of the WTO, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Economic Forum.

Yet, YES! is not an exclusive forum of some radical fringe. Here you can also read the views of fairly mainstream people who have worked at the core of the global economy. For example, the issue on local currencies, carries an interview with Bernard Lietaer, a Belgian who has worked as a currency trader and taught international finance at the University of Louvain, in Belgium. "Money is like an iron ring we've put through our noses," says Lietaer, "weve forgotten that we designed it, and it's now leading us around."

These are not merely ideas but efforts that are actually being made at the local level. Thousands of local currency systems are now working across North America, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Latin America.

YES! serves as a linkage point not only in the realm of ideas but actual networking for action among groups and individuals. This journal and the Positive Futures Network are merely one manifestation of a global trend. This is one of several forums which link a dispersed virtual community. The people of these loose groupings are clear about their vision of a more humane and just future. YES! is one of the platforms where the how-to part of that vision is being worked out.

YES! can be accessed through any search engine on the Internet or at www.futurenet.org.

RAJNI BAKSHI

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