by futureofthefree | Dec 21, 2013 | Freedom, Sustainability, The Future
Once upon a time the password to all my computer accounts was “freedom”. This was a long time ago, before I knew better then to use such a simple password. It meant learning, living, and loving – and not getting tied down and trapped in a meaningless job like all the adults around. As I approached 30 I re-defined this notion based on “reality”. Everyone certainly could not be wrong about what being a responsible and valuable member of society meant. I’d never be “successful” or have my own family if I kept being a “dreamer”. So, I began pursuing my own business ventures to make the almighty dollar.
I began spending nearly all my waking hours in hot pursuit of more money. This is what I did and did and did … and so on for about 7 years. Life passed me by, my oldest son grew up seemingly unnoticed. I had everything I needed, but certainly did not feel rich. It seemed I had nothing of real value to pass on to my kids even though I had money, This was not good. It seemed I was anchored to assets – whose future value seemed speculative at best. I was a far cry from the freedom I initially set out to find. Yet, everyone around me told me I was on the right track.
It occurred to me that all along there was an operating system at work that had been programmed into my brain from birth. It had nothing to do with my true nature, my real inate knowledge, nor any sort of coherence or connection to the natural world. It separated happiness from the hearts reality. It took 7 years living in the coastal redwoods of Santa Cruz, California next to a river, to even begin to unravel the neural web of premises and fear programmed into my subconscious brain. It took another 7 years of abandonment of the script to clean out my cache and begin to understand a different reality.
For those non egghead types: A cache is the temporary memory in a computer that is akin to our short term memory. It seems memorization is a fixation on equating intelligence with the ability to retain “facts”. Our meritocracy is based on this, and made real by the economy god. The foundation of our “civilization” depends on this program. Interestingly, a computer will eventually crash if you don’t clear the cache. Perhaps this is why we have so many anti-anxiety and depression drugs being prescribed, and so many people snapping and committing atrocious crimes. What more evidence do we need that we are on the wrong path? Read the daily world headlines for a month and you’ll see what trajectory we are on.
This is the short version of what brought about the birth of the Future of the Free project. The point is that we believe it is time to abandon the square world we have created and get off the grid and off the current script. We believe that a completely new way of seeing the world and each other is crucially needed at this time.
The institutions that have molded our beliefs and thus our world, are being revealed as not just economic failures, but more importantly, detrimental to our home – Earth. Our greatest asset and wealth is not a number on a computer screen governed by a very tiny group with questionable motives and horrific historical tack records.
We cannot leave our children and future to the care of this system. We do not intend any sort of conflict or revolution, for this is the way of the current consciousness that we are leaving. Our true power is in our collective cooperation based on love and true intention, unhindered by the fading system of scarcity, competition, and fear. Buckminster Fuller said it best:
“You never change things by fighting the
existing reality.
To change something, build a
new model that makes
the existing model
obsolete.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
by futureofthefree | Dec 11, 2013 | Education, Sustainability, The Future
For the last seven years a group of family and friends and myself have been working on building a better new future. We started by opening an educational museum and built products around it to show the possibilities. This included the hemp surfboard, artist canvases, hemp jeans, T-shirts and much more. Check it out.
This was great, but the web was changing dramatically during this time. We began getting heavily involved in online development and realized that the web was a much greater tool then surfboards and T-shirts.
Shortly after we decided that to take advantage of the latest web technologies would be essential to spread our messages. So, we developed WebsiteWag – focused on providing web tools for everyone to use – especially non-profits.
A couple of years later we began to home school my two young sons ages five and seven. It quickly became apparent that I didn’t have any good answers to all the important questions they had about how the world works. I didn’t believe the standard script, and certainly didn’t want to pass that along.
So we went back to the drawing board. With the help of friends, family – and especially the emerging web community and knowledge base; we were able to develop our latest and greateset project. We joined our commitment to a better future with our love of innovation and technology to create our latest and greatest development – Future of the Free.
The idea started when planning the first year of home schooling for my young sons Ben and Toby – ages 5 and 7. I had to explain money, energy, war, poverty, jobs, taxes and so on – in a way that made sense and wouldn’t be scary to them. Answers to seemingly basic questions always required a string of explanations that showed that every aspect of our lives and relationships are governed by money – but has little to do with human needs – or logic! The result is a tremendous waste of human resources, separated families and communities – loads of pollution and toxins EVERYWHERE. The Bees are even dying off – a third are already gone!
Do I really want to spend my time teaching my boys how to be a so called success in such a system? Of course not. It simply did not make any sense.
There has got to be a better way! – Especially considering that we now know that everything is truly connected. What we do and feel creates the world around us and even gives structure to water, life to electrons at a quantum level and emits energy waves just beginning to be understood.
When expressing to friends how I feel about all this – the rhetorical response I nearly always get: is:
Well – you can’t do anything about it?
After hearing this too many times we decided something indeed should be done. Be the change you want to see Right? Our current system of competition, war, and waste simply needs to be replaced. This means truly using our creative will along with the spirit of our communities to really do something different.
Do something different!
We would start by doing something that made simple sense. Something that is founded on providing the basic human essentials. This would need to be something that discerning folks could easily recognize as worthy and easily acted upon. This system would have to be something cheap, easy, and readily duplicated. Something anyone could build that would be a solution for the basic human needs
A Simple Solution
A simple start is as simple as re-establishing our human connections to nature and each other. No politician, legislation, military or scape goating can change our current conditions.
Provide the Basics – and all else will follow…
– Food, Water, Shelter, and most importantly strong social relationships through community cooperation.
Create a real simple system to take care of our basic needs. The criteria were to develop a simple, fast, affordable, and portable system.
Building criteria were decided:
1. Use parts that are most common throughout the world
2. Use parts that could be easily substituted with functionally similar materials available locally.
3. Use parts that are free and/or cheap
Our goal is to get back to basics in the most sustainable and accessible way.
Please join us.
[break]
by futureofthefree | Dec 11, 2013 | Education, Freedom, Sustainability, The Future
The amount of books that have been written is astounding. This bygone era of paper books is nearly past, being replaced with an online web of constant chatter and lots of daily content. We believe this thriving dialogue could instigate some real changes in what we call “the script”.
What is everyone writing and talking about? It seems most everyone is repeating the same topics, phrases, responses, and reactions. It is work, sports, movies, politics, news – or more accurately bad news. Is someone writing this script? Is it simply our collective consciousness at work?
Either way it seems that we are the actors.
Our current collective script is destroying the planet and causing lots of strife for the majority of people. So why do we keep acting it out – even to the detriment of health, home, and family. Even if you are in the top 1% -does it make sense to maintain the status quo? Quantum physics has recently revealed the real physical/spiritual connections we all share. There is no hiding in a gated community.
But this is not a philisophical discussion. This is simply a proposition for a new script. One that does not make excuses or justifications for injustices. A script that does not pit us against one another in constant competition, then play the blame game until we are all damned. Simply speaking, a script that focuses on our least common denominator that binds us together; cooperating to supply our families with food, water, shelter and most importantly solid family and community foundations. This is true security that doesn’t rely on a politician, legislation, and a police state for order. This means recognizing that the enemy and bad guys are the result of an absence of basic societal structures. No NSA needed.
Living from a new script is possible. It seems to be a choice we make every moment of every day. This is how I believe the future will define freedom – the flexibility to really make your own life choices every day – without the hinderence of a script that says we need to digress to the economy script. Here is one way to live in harmony with nature and each other -right now. Make a Choice.
Some may say that this is impossible and say, ” Look at history, survival of the fittest, greed is good, that is naive, it’s not economically viable, there is not enough evidence, need new legislation, the economy is headed in the right direction…” etc etc etc.
There is that darn script again! It’s time for a new one for sure.
by Aaron Rene Carvajal | Nov 12, 2013 | Agriculture, Aquaponics, Design & Innovation, Dome Homes, Geodesic Domes, Sustainability
We love the idea of a super strong, fast, portable and affordable structure that can be a home or a food pod. There are many incredible geodesic bio dome projects online. We absorbed as much as we could and then decided it would be great if there were a kit that could easily be created and built by anyone anywhere with parts that are free, cheap, and available everywhere.
There are some really nice geo-domes and aquaponic kits online, but most are pretty expensive. Most use custom parts that would be pricey to replace. The homemade ones are awesome, but generally are not available in an easy to build kit. You have to go out and source all the parts, measure,cut, drill etc. Not everyone is a do-it-yourselfer builder type. So, we decided something should be available for the rest of us.
Here it is. Check it out.
