Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

July 11th, 2023

We all know about the accelerating pace of change that we are going through. There are those who argue that this change has an exponential curve, that the rate of change is actually doubling in every unit of time. Logically that’s not accurate or provable but it’s a way for us to picture the fact that change is happening more and more quickly. One way this is happening is that fundamental changes in our world are multiplying, a breakthrough in materials science changes computing, a breakthrough in neuroscience leads to new approaches in mental health.

In no small way is PROOF a product of this era of rapid growth and change. We are out to help you understand how all of this change affects your life and more importantly our future together. Our particular concern is generating a positive future, a desirable and thriving future for humanity. My intention is that PROOF emails expose you to the positive future being generated, and how your contribution can help shape it into the kind of future we desire for ourselves and the world. By immersing ourselves in these innovations, you gain a clearer vision of the future and recognize the various ways you can actively participate in making it a reality.

Right now you may be thinking, what can I do about something as big as the future of the world? The answer is everything. Innovations in science, tech, art, education, media, communications, meditation, business, economics, physics, etc. come from the collective consciousness of any one of these areas. The history of simultaneous inventions is full of examples of two or more people inventing the same thing at the same time. For example:

Calculus — Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Telephone — Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied for a patent on the same day in 1876.

Radio — Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi. Television — Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin independently inventing the first electronic television.

Thermometer — Galileo Galilei and Santorio Santorio.

Light Bulb — Sir Hiram Maxim, Sir Joseph Swan, and Thomas Edison all developed versions of incandescent light bulbs around the same time.

Photography — Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot

You may wonder why? The explanation lies in one of humanity’s greatest superpowers, synthesis. Given an information rich environment we put two and two together and create something new, some new understanding or approach that both relies on the already present information and builds something completely new out of it.

The above inventions are all things that made a positive impact on the future of humanity. There are other terrible inventions that have had a devastating impact on humanity including:

The Atomic Bomb — During World War II, both the Allies and the Axis powers were working on developing nuclear weapons. The Allies’ Manhattan Project, however, succeeded first in 1945. The Soviet Union, working independently, developed their own atomic bomb by 1949.

Chemical Weapons — Germany, France, and Britain all began developing and using chemical warfare agents like chlorine and mustard gas around the same time.

Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) — The United States and the Soviet Union were both working on ICBMs during the Cold War.

Biological Weapons — United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the Soviet Union.

Automatic Firearms — Maxim gun, Browning Automatic Rifle, and various models of machine guns.

History would argue that these inventions, just like the ones I mentioned earlier, were created in response to the collective conditions of their time. Yet the impact of these perfected killing technologies in terms of lives lost and their ability to harm life at scale, makes them things that we wish we had never invented.

Now back to you, and me and what we have to do with these kinds of inventions. As I talked about in You are what you attend to who we are is directly related to what we think about and give our attention to. This works on both the individual and the collective level. We are collectively what we attend to, as I am what I attend to.This has lead to some really bizarre inventions like Tik-Tok a place where people try and condense video based content into a very tiny container to atomize attention. It was hilarious watching my wife trying to follow a recipe for a tahini beet dressing from a 60 second video clip.

If you think about it for a moment, Tik Tok is a natural evolution of social media. And it has a direction towards more and more sensational, more and more shorter clips. It changes both the way we process information and the way that we create information. We are what we create. Or you might consider that we create our future selves by the things we fill our days with today. This is our contribution to evolution and many satirists have poked fun at the future of humanity where we are confined to floating chairs with a steady stream of meaningless content plugged into our brains.

Seriously, we are in charge of our own destiny as a species.

If we want a future that is desirable. If we want to evolve to be more ethical, loving and kind, we can do so. All that is required is that a sufficient number of us focus our attention, time and work on the steps that lead us there, while at the same time governing and prohibiting technologies and businesses that cause damage to people and the earth.

You can learn about the ideas that have us head us towards a thriving future in PROOF. You can consciously take ownership of your attention and focus on the things that elevate life, that inspire you towards positive action in the world.

My hope for you is that you discover your gifts, that you orientate yourself towards your purpose, and that you make a contribution to the world you want to live in.

If we all do this, then imagine all of the great things that will come about from our collective consciousness.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
Editor PROOF

P.S.  I would love you to follow our Podcast, subscribe to us on Youtube, sign up for the PROOF email and subscribe if you love reading PROOF

Proof 55 – Conscious Innovation Unleashed

May this information inspire you to generate a thriving future for humanity and a thriving life for yourself. For more resources please check out our Podcast and Youtube channel.

-The Bold.ly Now Team

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

Follow us

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• YouTube

PROOF is a Generative Futures Initiative Project

The Generative Futures Initiative
Generating a Thriving Future for All
generativefutures.org

The post Conscious Innovation Unleashed appeared first on PROOFZINE.

Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

June 27th, 2023

It’s late at night, past my bedtime and I am still up scrolling through the news. Next to me my wife Alex is watching food reels on Instagram, you know the ones that look so great but never get made by anyone anytime. The moments slip by and we slowly exchange a good night’s sleep for mental junk food. Smart phones were supposed to liberate us from our computers. Social media promised to connect us to old friends and family. We all know it didn’t work out that way. Rather we have invented and optimized an attention grabbing machine that gobbles up our time. But we all know that the Faustian bargain we signed was a bad deal.

Your attention is your most valuable possession.

We live our lives moment-by-moment. Each moment holds our entire existence. We have a past that is made up of your recollections, stories, and memories you can see in your mind, but you can’t touch them — they’re not real in this moment. The future is the same. You might have plans, expectations, visions and scheduled events, but none of that is real, in this moment. This moment is all we have and it is precious. The question is will we celebrate our moments or will we squander them away.

Imagine, if you will, a silver bowl of perfect pearls. These are the moments left in your life. Young or old there are a finite number of them. And every moment you take a pearl out of the bowl and do something with it. The bowl now has one less pearl as you take another one in your hand. Stop and contemplate the pearl in your hand. It is perfect, luminous, rare and so fragile it will be gone before the second hand can make its sweep of the clock. And now there is a new pearl to consider.

In this way your life is renewed, reborn every moment of your existence.

This might be a good time to stop reading this essay and go for a walk, tell someone you love them, or go smell the roses. If you journey forward with me a little further, I very much appreciate you investing your time in me and this conversation.

If you can get the immediacy of this one precious moment — the pearl that is your life, it’s easy to see why people would want to grab your attention and keep it for as many moments as they can. The combined market cap of Meta (Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram), Alphabet (Google and Youtube) and upcomer Tik Tok is nearly $3 trillion. That’s a 3 with 9 zeros. $3,000,000,000. That’s a lot of wealth being generated from your minutes.

So what do we do?

By now we all know that we should be “more present”, “be mindful”, “be here now”. But knowing this doesn’t magically make us more present or mindful. WHY NOT? It hardly seems fair. If we want to develop the ability to really savor our moments, we have to get to the bottom of this question.

First of all let’s face the facts, most of us are highly distracted. We spend large chunks of time down rabbit holes that leave us unable to explain “where the time has gone”. Worse yet we are like blackout drunks, unable to even recall exactly what we did last night. In the morning we might even say to ourselves, I’m not doing that again. But when the evening sets in our willpower is weak and we are back at whatever time wasting activity is calling us most loudly, binging a new series, infinite scrolling our social feeds, left/right swiping our desires or old school channel flipping (if you are old enough to have that time wasting pattern in your brain).

The reason why we do this is not very complicated. It goes like this: Life is not so easy. We get roughed up by the pressure of our jobs or school. We have challenging relationships with colleagues, lovers, friends and family. The background of our cultural life is filled with divisiveness and turmoil. Media pundits tell us that the sky is falling everyday. Civility is rare if you live in the states, traffic is ubiquitous. Even the weather cannot be counted upon any more due to climate change. It can seem like you are under assault all day everyday. It’s no wonder you want a break, or more accurately your brain want’s stimulation that distracts it from the onslaught. So we click that link when we should be working on a report. We leave our notices on and end up a million miles away in an instant.

From a psychological perspective these are coping mechanisms and they are not necessarily bad (addictions being the exception to this statement). They help us manage our emotional world. The problem is when we go from needing a coping mechanism a few times a month or a week, to needing a coping mechanism everyday and for some of us almost every minute of everyday.

Getting this illuminates why you can’t just be present. If you are triggered and a coping mechanism comes up, it’s unlikely, unless you practice, that you can say no to engaging in the coping mechanism.

Digging a little deeper we can see that the real lever here is stimulus that triggers us. If we can limit, slow down or disconnect from the onslaught, then we will begin to experience life when it is not an emergency. Then we can start doing things that are important to us rather than dealing with emergencies, including the urgent items we can handle and the urgent ones we practically have no say about like political drama.

It’s time for a digital/information detox.

The first step here is to find a way to limit your exposure to the drama machine that our media provides. This might include scheduled time away from your phone and computer every day. You might consider a media free vacation or staycation where you don’t touch a phone or a computer for a number of days. Or you could set aside a day that is device and media free.

Then, with nothing streaming in, it gets quiet in your brain. That alone might trigger you if there are underlying issues in your life like loneliness, depression or physical challenges. If you stay with it though, even those issues will begin to calm. After a number of days, hours for some of us, a kind of boredom will arise. This is when you can begin to focus on the things that bring joy to your life. I recommend reading, making a cup of tea or coffee and drinking it in silence — savoring the flavor, going on a long walk to nowhere for no reason, preparing a simple healthy meal, gardening, listening to some favorite music or simply being quiet for some time. These are all activities that have you be present with whatever is happening in the moment. This includes daydreaming, which can also be present in the moment. Make a list of these small quiet things that bring you joy, and calm your mind.

All of these activities are ones that foster mindfulness. You don’t have to have any special mediation practice, just the practice of doing the things that bring you simple joy.

If and when you are ready to take a step towards meditation, I recommend a simple breathing practice to my students. You can start with a box breath: Inhale fully for a slow count of four. Hold your breath in for a count of four. Slowly exhale for a count of four. Hold your breath out for a count of four. You can start with 5–10 breaths in the box and slowly extend that time to 10 minutes. I find that this breath pattern puts me into a deep reflective and relaxed state after only a few minutes of breathing. And if I am ever stressed or about to do something stressful, I take three box breaths as a grounding reset.

To live a life savoring our precious moments, we have to make space for us to be. This is swimming against the media current and is a challenge if you don’t have a habit of having media free time. Then the kind of media you put your attention on is important. You can seek out positive news like our PROOF magazine, or read curated news themes on Flipboard. If you feel the need to be social, phone calls with friends and family can be very sweet. Creating these new habits builds a mindful existence that leads to the presence of life that we have all been missing so much.

You can get started with this joyful project by scheduling a few hours of media/device free time today. It’s absolutely worth your time.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
Editor PROOF

P.S.  I would love you to follow our Podcast, subscribe to us on Youtube, sign up for the PROOF email and subscribe if you love reading PROOF

Proof 52 – The Key to Investing Your Attention Wisely

May this information inspire you to generate a thriving future for humanity and a thriving life for yourself. For more resources please check out our Podcast and Youtube channel.

-The Bold.ly Now Team

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

Follow us

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• YouTube

PROOF is a Generative Futures Initiative Project

The Generative Futures Initiative
Generating a Thriving Future for All
generativefutures.org

The post The Key to Investing Your Attention Wisely appeared first on PROOFZINE.

Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

June 1st, 2023

I woke up this morning, uneasy. Was it a dream? Something I ate last night? I sat up confused by the dull headache, reminiscent of a hangover — impossible as I had had nothing to drink the night before. “All is not well this morning,” was the broadcast I was receiving. What then? News on the feed was bad, is bad, is always bad. Maybe it’s a news hangover, I thought. I need to swear off the default American news sources.

Who am I this morning? Uneasy, not at home in the body.

Breathe then, always the breath. We take 17,000 of them a day. I try to make at least 500 of those conscious ones. In…hold…out…hold…repeat…times 10. Green tea and then a stretch into my body. Starting to feel — a — bit — more — like — the — becoming — me.

My spiritual practice is to take everything in every moment as the path to awakening. Poison as path. Joy as path. Work as path. Boredom as path. Path as path.

I have a craving to know what is going on in the world. I want the news of the day, everyday. I take it in full firehose. Like all cravings it comes with a clear cost — mostly my tranquility. I close the traditional feeds and switch to my PROOF feed, everyday the AI sends me a collection of positive stories about the future. Stories from people who give a damn about the future. My nervous system resets and I start feeling a glimmer of excitement. There are good things going on out there.

As is inside so is it outside, as it is outside so it is inside — clear — but what to make of it? If I am uneasy is that because the world is uneasy, or is the world uneasy because I am uneasy? Until I shift my attention to the outside piece that is positive, and then I am positive. I am what my I put my attention on, or where my attention gets grabbed. Rabbit holes are everywhere: 12 notifications have gone off in the last 4 minutes, updates and responses, notes to read and research

Snap awake, question: How do we transcend who we are to make way for who we are becoming?

We don’t have the life we want today, the world we want to live in today. No one likes the state of the world today. My inner cynic knows these roads only too well.

Yet we can see what is emergent in the world. A growing movement of world designers are sharpening their imagineering pencils and designing their way out of the chaos. New economic systems, new physics, new governance models, new transport and energy systems. All we need to do is let them get their hands on the wheel and drive this old world forward into a thriving future.

How do we get the powerful of this world to step aside?

As it is outside so it is inside. What is it in me that is standing in the way of that which I am becoming? Fixed, attached, impatient little old me. How do I get you to stand aside to let love and wisdom emerge?

Time to meditate, to be.

Evolution is messy. Our evolution is uneven, more of a probability cloud moving in the direction of a better future than a linear progression. We have remnants of Neanderthal DNA in our genetics. We are a mishmash of everything that has gone before with some really cool features, like thinking, imagination, laguage, empathy, love and compassion. The same is true of our civilization. We have Hamurabi’s eye-for-an-eye code of justice living side by side with the International Court of Justice (World Court). We have pollution spewing 200m super yachts ferrying champagne guzzling elites alongside radical gift economists who refuse payment for work and live off the gifts of others. Evolution is here, just unevenly distributed (Wiliam Gibson, on the future).

We are evolving towards becoming a new kind of human and we are stuck in the past and we are playing with technologies that threaten the very viability of life on earth. All of these things and more are a part of the emergent future.

Same on the inside. Most of us are at war with ourselves, belittling ourselves with our imperfect bodies, our imperfect minds, our left/right broken hearts, all the while doubling down on courses, workout classes, yoga retreats, low fat-keto fat-animal protein-vegan diets, all the while measuring our self worth by the likes our — superficial, glossy, made for streaming, I am camera ready always, even when I am crying my eyes out — social communities.

How do we transcend who we are to make room for who we are becoming.

The answer is that we must transcend our current self without leaving it behind. This means that we can erase ourselves, even the parts we may not like, rather we have to include who we are today as we become our future selves. That rings true, right?

So I get out of bed, uneasy, and breathe…and stretch…and settle into my future self, without having to reconcile or repress or make my uneasy experience wrong. It is just what it is, an uneasy feeling today, a sad one tomorrow, and something else the day after. I am just how I am. Who I am becoming is okay with that, more okay than today’s self is.

That feels a lot like evolution. It’s a good day to become. That’s true for me. That’s true for the future of humanity.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
Editor PROOF

P.S.  I would love you to follow our Podcast, subscribe to us on Youtube, sign up for the PROOF email and subscribe if you love reading PROOF

Proof 50 – World Building from the Inside Out

May this information inspire you to generate a thriving future for humanity and a thriving life for yourself. For more resources please check out our Podcast and Youtube channel.

-The Bold.ly Now Team

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

Follow us

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• YouTube

PROOF is a Generative Futures Initiative Project

The Generative Futures Initiative
Generating a Thriving Future for All
generativefutures.org

The post World Building from the Inside appeared first on PROOFZINE.