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Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

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We can’t escape the past, but we can still see the future

When we look at the starry sky, which caused so much admiration to Kant, we don’t see its present but its past and, in some cases, even if we don’t know it, we contemplate a distant past, billions of years ago. Even that the sun we "see" is already eight minutes in the past and the moon we see is the moon that existed a minute ago.

And if we are sitting at a table for a family dinner or maybe to share a coffee with a friend, that person we see is the person who existed in the past and, albeit a past that happened just a fraction of a millisecond ago. But it already happened, because our senses need time to process sensory stimuli.

So, be it because light takes time to reach us or because our senses do not acquire the information instantly, what comes to us and to our brain has already passed. We live, then, locked in a constant perception of the past.

It could be said that we call it “the present” or, better said, what we consider the "now" is only a memory, an interpretation of the past that still remains in our consciousness, in our mind, because the information or the stimulus that caused that memory or that interpretation has just happened and we are still processing it.

In other words, as Augustine already said (better than I can say it now), memories of the past are actually memories of the present. The past, therefore, is one of the forms of the present. If the past were totally past, then we would not have any access to it.

So, from a physical and biological perspective, the past in the present is all we have. What we know, what we think we know, what we simply believe, what we remember and what we have forgotten, all that is a product of the past or better yet, of the past that we now remember in the present.

But, as Augustine suggested, if we have memories of the past, we must also have memories of the future. That is, although everything we perceive, from the furthest star to the nearest person, is in the past, that doesn’t mean we can’t “see” the future.

The future didn’t always exist. The cyclical time in which our ancestors lived, moved and existed until not long ago didn’t leave room for the future because everything moved within a cycle of repetitions.

The future is only possible if time is freed from the return of the same. But we, instead of liberating time and creating a future, have enslaved time to mechanical time (Chronos). We can’t remember the future because what we call "future" is not. We deceive ourselves by saying that we don't know something that it really isn't.

How do we see the future? Not with our five senses or with an emphatically closed mind. Maybe, then, you have to open your mind and activate a new sense.

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