What is the epoch if not the whole of human intentions at work? The accumulation of history, all the traces of the constructed past, but also the aspirations of those who are alive, pushing the present in one direction or another. It is this fragile layer of consciousness that determines events and makes us imagine different possible futures.
In each historical moment, individuals and peoples overcome the difficulties imposed by the world and allow the species to advance – or retreat – one more step. All this accumulation, this enormous sum of knowledge, is passed on from generation to generation and establishes new conditions, each time with more possibilities, for those who will come.
Thus, these are the most complex times since they retain all human wisdom in the broadest fields of knowledge, possess all the collective experience, the contradictory and cruel facts as well as the teachings of goodness. These are very special times in which nothing is certain as to the direction that events may take.
Even less so in the present circumstances, in which an external factor – a virus – puts in check the way we live and accelerates the crisis that has already been dragging the system down in so many ways.
The minds of the people, of everyone, determine the epoch, orienting the acts towards values and intangibles that we are representing, imagining, wanting to achieve. It is not the same as what we think at present, nor what we feel. That thinking and feeling will guide actions and according to them will determine the times to come. What we reject and what we consider obsolete, everything we want to overcome.
The global crossroads we are now facing are resolved in our own consciences and then become concrete facts. But if they are not resolved, if they remain as paradoxes that we cannot face and overcome, they paralyze us and we will not be able to escape the ecological crisis, the nuclear threat, the merciless neoliberalism, the poverty of the great majorities, the discrimination, the violence and the madness.
We are all in the same boat and its rudder takes us where we think. It is the great ideological or mystical proposals, the mother ideas, that are needed in dark times. Ideas that inspire hearts and illuminate action.
That is what the era is, certain interpretations of reality, a way of deciphering what we consider sacred and of placing it outside or inside oneself, some force-ideas and principles that can govern action.
Always, in every historical moment, there were human beings who tried to preserve and maintain the prevailing conditions (especially if it favored them) and there were those who bet on changing them. Normally changes, even if delayed, end up making their way. Nothing is static and history inevitably moves forward. But there are also moments when the conditions for profound transformations can be accelerated, opportunities where revolution is possible.
If we look closely at a given historical moment, we will see within it those more dynamic elements, people who are determined, and we will see that in one way or another they establish relations and make contact, they inspire each other, they support each other to advance even when they are distanced geographically and even culturally. The more progressive elements come into resonance with each other and this allows for a gain in evolutionary momentum and succeeds in giving dynamics to the process.
Some ideas are replaced by others, the old beliefs are worn out and finally the signs of a new dawn can be seen on the horizon.
But those people who are watching, who sense it, often come into contact with each other and influence each other.
That is our task now. To meet all those who open up horizons, who build possibilities beyond today, who seek to break out of current limitations in order to advance towards another kind of society and of the singular human being.
Social change alone is not enough, nor is individual personal change. Things are either simultaneous or they are not. But there are already many who have understood this and our era is unfolding multiple possibilities, experiments, proposals, new formulations that can gain strength if we meet each other and begin to empower each other.
To change the era is to open up to those who are already moving towards the future. It is to raise one’s own torch and make oneself seen, to give signals to reach out and meet each other, to be positively disposed towards it, because we need each other. None of us will go out alone into the times to come, least of all if we want them to be reconciled, if we seek to secure peace.
We need to build convergences, meetings, dialogues. We need to value diversity, which in its own way and in a way different from us, points equally in the same direction.
