Everywhere we look legacy systems are breaking down. Banks are collapsing, governments no longer represent the best interest of their people and trusted institutions have lost much of their credibility. At the same time, powerful AI has officially entered our day-to-day lives. We are getting a glimpse of how quickly it will outcompete much of human activity today.
We are at a point where the collective expansion of consciousness must accelerate for humanity to thrive, let alone survive. Only if we learn to better listen to each other, and move towards a more decentralized form of governance, will we be able to tap into the power of these exponential technologies and harness them in service of the greater good.
2 options ahead
Option 1:
The status quo leads us down the path where concentration of power increases and AI evolves in ways that bring order and control to our lives. We will be told that restricting our personal freedoms is for the greater societal good. We will learn to accept this new way of life, and, in the best-case scenario, it will be comfortable and uncomplicated, which for some of us might feel like happiness.
For this scenario to become reality our collective consciousness must remain at the lower frequencies. It’s the consciousness of fear, judgment, victimhood, belonging that keeps us divided, and it’s exactly this division that makes us give our power away. The more we allow power to centralize into the hands of a few, the more likely this dystopian future awaits.
Option 2:
If we seize the moment, there is another path available to us, one that requires a collective shift into higher levels of consciousness. We must reach a tipping point where we move beyond surface level divisions, acknowledge our shared humanity, and embrace the frequencies that unite us as human beings. Accessing and expressing our capacity for love, compassion, forgiveness, as well as the inner strength and courage needed to speak up in these turbulent times, is key to reclaiming our power as responsible citizens and creators of our own destiny.
If we choose to travel down this path, we will learn the art of listening to each other, discover 3rd way solutions to our differences and access the full spectrum of our human potential. We will have reinvigorated our capacity for imagination, rebuilt trust in our intuition and reestablished connection to a higher power.
This is a future where the individual can be trusted to make decisions and govern with the best interest of humanity in mind. This is a future where chaos and uncertainty can be embraced and met with a presence that transforms and opens new doors. This is a future where AI is our friend, working in harmony to build a world we all want to be a part of.
Such a human-centric version of tomorrow may seem like a faraway dream, but the way I see it, we are already well on our way to ushering in this new reality, and Cardano is leading the way.
Cardano blockchain – making the world better for all
When I first came across this project in 2020, I had very limited understanding of the technology but there was a strong resonance to the project & community. Looking back now I understand why. I could relate to the inspiring vision of “banking the unbanked” and “connecting the unconnected”. I admired the commitment to decentralization and self-governance. I enjoyed watching this ecosystem build itself from the ground up, understanding the value of different projects and eventually participating in block validation. I witnessed a passionate community willing to engage in difficult conversations, collaborate across project lines and act as responsible stewards for the entire industry.
However, it wasn’t until the 2022 Cardano Summit in Switzerland that I started to see how I could uniquely contribute to this vibrant ecosystem. During Charles Hoskinson’s closing speech, he emphasized the importance of listening to each other as the key to successfully unlocking the power of self-governance. He expressed it as follows:
The thing we must master is to listen. The reason why governance is so difficult at its core is that we overvalue speaking and undervalue listening. If this is truly going to work, it’s not going to rest on our great tech. We’ve already proven we can do that. It’s not going to rest on the great community. We’ve already proven we have that. What we haven’t proven, and in some cases haven’t done so well on, is that we can listen to each other. That’s going to be the hard one. That’s the one we are all going to have to work on, myself included.
NFT project for deep listening and unleashing human potential
I remember leaving the summit knowing that the many years of working in human potential development had set us up to play a role in this new era of self-governance. Deep listening is at the core of the BEING at Full Potential approach when working with individuals, teams and organizations. Our workshops are designed to be generative spaces where each person’s contribution becomes a critical component of a bigger story that emerges. Over the years we have worked with Vanessa Jane Smith, a brilliant artist, who has the gift of listening to our deepest human yearnings and capturing them with language and symbols that speak directly to the heart. The depth of wisdom being generated in these pictures is not only incredibly useful as a follow up summary for the workshop participants but it’s also a rich source of artistic inspiration for all of us. Hundreds of these images are available.
This has sparked the idea to build an NFT project that incentivizes deeper listening within the Cardano ecosystem, and eventually also beyond. Each NFT is a combination of the art we have captured over the years and practical calls to action inviting us to experiment with deeper listening and reflect on the impact it has on the people around us.
We are also imagining an innovative way of using the blockchain technology to deploy and incentivize usage of these NFT’s. Instead of owning them we are building a mechanism that encourages sharing them so that deeper acts of listening can be multiplied throughout the ecosystem.
Once the NFT has been passed on a certain number of times (let’s say 10) and the associated stories have been collected, it will be put up for auction to whoever wants to own the art and invest in the positive impact it is having. The proceeds of the sale will then be distributed amongst the project team and all the people who have contributed to the initiative along the way. Hopefully making it a true win-win-win proposition.
It is exciting to have discovered a beautiful point of alignment between our mission to accelerate human potential development in the world and the exciting journey of growth that the Cardano ecosystem is on. We welcome any collaboration opportunities with the broader community to help turn this idea into reality and usher in a new era of governance that harnesses the creative potential of all of us.
Liberty of thought is the life of the soul. Voltaire