The Mythology of the Future?

Yeah. Good morning, or good evening, Xerxes. My name is Tom Lombardo, and I'm the director of the Center for Future Consciousness, which is based in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area. I'm a futurist, a philosopher, a PhD in psychology though.

I'm a member of the World Futures Studies Federation. I'm on the executive board of the World Futures Studies Federation, and I'm also a fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation. Fellows are futurists who have been recognized as making some significant contribution globally to the study of the future.

I'm a retired college professor and taught at various colleges and universities for 34 years. Now I devote myself primarily to teaching, mostly online, doing webinars, mostly online, and also writing books. I'm just finishing up two new books at the moment on the history of science fiction.

That's a brief introduction, except for the fact that I grew up in New England and slowly migrated from the east coast of the United States over to the west coast and to the deserts of Arizona.

Yes. Xerxes, when we first talked, you actually mentioned the term turning point. People often have turning points in their life, when they move in a different direction from where they were moving before. Often those turning points are what determine where you end up, or the pathway that you move along.

When I stopped and thought about that, I thought, well, actually, I've had lots of different turning points along the way, and some of them I created myself. For example, at one point I decided that I needed to leave academia as a teacher, as a professor, and get out into the real world and dive into things. That was a learning experience that was psychologically traumatic, but in the end rather educational.

Like I said, I've had various points at which something important happens, and in some way or another it structured where you end up. When I was young, an early significant experience was becoming enthralled with science fiction. It gave me a sense of the cosmos, of the big picture of things, and of the possibilities of the future and the possibilities that exist out in the universe.

A main feature, I would guess, of my thinking, my writing, my consciousness is that I've always been attracted to big-picture, big-perspective, cosmic issues and themes. That is also how I got interested, later on in college, in philosophy: encountering Plato and then Aristotle, and then all of the other significant philosophers who looked at the big picture of it all, what it all means and how one goes about trying to understand it. I became very specifically enthralled with Spinoza and his massive metaphysical system.

So there was science fiction, discovering it. There was philosophy, discovering it. There was jumping out into the real world, or not the real world, the alternate reality, and getting away from academia, which was a learning experience.

I've got to highlight a couple more. Later on, I discovered the study of time and evolution, and in particular the president of the International Society for the Study of Time, J. T. Fraser. I went to listen to him one night, and he just blew me away and turned everything upside down. I got very fascinated with his ideas on what time is, why there is time and how it fits into everything. And what is evolution? What is this that's going on around us?

I suppose moving to Arizona was also a significant point in my life, because it was after I moved to Arizona that I realized I was fascinated, from many different perspectives, with the study of the future. I actually started to teach it when I got out here to Arizona, back in the 1990s. Before that, I was interested in science fiction, philosophy and evolution, but I hadn't put it all together. In Arizona, I ended up putting it together: I started to teach courses on the future, started to write on the future, and joined the World Future Society and then the World Futures Studies Federation. So that was a big event.

Then maybe 10 years later, I got very interested in the study of wisdom and met somebody who had a really excellent website called The Wisdom Page. His name was Copthorne Macdonald. We became friends, and I began writing on wisdom, the study of the future and future consciousness. That was a big thing, back in the early part of the millennium, when I got into wisdom and connected it up with consciousness of the future.

And, not "I suppose", definitely, one other big event that influenced me along the way was meeting my present wife, Jeanne Lombardo. After Jeanne and I got together and were married, I interestingly became much more productive as a writer than I had ever been before. I had thrown a lot of time and energy into teaching and other things. But once we got together, I really started to publish lots of articles, and my book productivity went up. Whatever it was, Jeanne settled me down and gave me some focus.

So that's just a brief history of the things that impacted me, of the turning points. Sometimes they hit me on the head, whether I was expecting it or not. Sometimes I intentionally went after a change. But there have been surprises, things that happened that I wasn't anticipating, and then boom, there was this revelation, for whatever reason.

To finish the answer to that question: about 10 years ago, I decided to write an intellectual autobiography, which Jeanne and I actually wrote together, Mind Flight. It's a story about the evolution of my thinking from a teenager up to [today]. So what I was talking about just now, I talk about in a lot more detail, and with more drama, in this book, Mind Flight.

Good question, and I've got a lot to say. Here are some of the main ideas, the main points I would make about science fiction.

Number one, science fiction is actually about the future of everything. Not just the future of science and technology, but the future of everything, which includes society, the human mind, ethics. All the dimensions of the future get covered in science fiction stories. In fact, a really good science fiction writer is able to create integrative pictures of the future that include all the dimensions of human reality. And beyond: science fiction even goes beyond the future, in that it gets into alternate universes, alternate dimensions, alternate timelines, sometimes delving into the past as well. So that's one thing: we shouldn't just associate science fiction with science and technology.

Secondly, science fiction is an expression of the human effort to speculate on and understand the big picture of the cosmos, in space and time. Science fiction takes you beyond the immediate here and now and stretches your imagination out into the vast extent of time, both past and future, and the vast extent of space, the universe, existence. So in that way it connects up with philosophy, because philosophy gets into the big picture of things too. But science fiction does it in narrative form. Science fiction is stories. It's not abstract, theoretical exposition. It's stories, stories which grab your attention and grab your emotions.

That brings me to a third main thing about science fiction, which I proposed at the beginning of my history of science fiction: science fiction is our modern mythology, or mythologies, because there's more than one story, more than one narrative. Science fiction actually evolved out of our ancient, classical mythologies. If you come up with a list of the qualities or characteristics of ancient mythologies, they were fantastical, they often had ethical messages to them, they involved rituals and participation, they had icons, and numerous other qualities. If you line them up with the qualities of science fiction, the qualities are all the same.

What has changed is the theories of reality that the ancient mythologies assumed, say, for example, a God-centered, creationist theory of reality, or that the earth is 4,000 or 6,000 years old. The theory of reality changed as we moved into modern times. So our modern mythologies, which are science fiction, are informed by modern theories of reality rather than more ancient theories.

That's not an absolute by any means, because science fiction writers have still frequently included ancient theories of reality in their stories. For example, just to throw one in here: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, an award-winning science fiction novel, presented a futurist, techno version of the Hindu deities and the Buddha in a modern science fiction setting, techno-enhanced deities.

But science fiction is a mythology in that it provides us with narratives that emotionally and motivationally stimulate us, inform us and inspire us, in the same way that ancient mythologies did.

A fourth thing to bring in here, and this is connected with the mythology point: science fiction is the most influential form of thinking about the future in contemporary times. More people watch it, read it or are influenced by it than by any other approach to the future. The reason why, in part, is that science fiction impacts the whole person. It doesn't just simply stimulate the intellect. It stimulates one's emotions, one's motivation, one's values. It hits the whole person, so we engage with it and participate in the reality holistically. That's why it's so powerful. That's why it's so influential.

So I suppose those are four key points about science fiction. Well, maybe one more, because I think this is important too.

Science fiction is not something recent. Science fiction has been evolving for decades, if not centuries, and centuries and centuries. You could see it as an approach to facilitating the evolution, the future evolution, of humanity and the conscious mind, in that it gives us ideas about the possibilities of the future and of existence. It inspires us to think and behave and act and be different than we were in the past. So it's actually an ongoing collective activity to evolve ourselves, and particularly to evolve our minds.

Many, many different ideas come up in science fiction: from physical technologies to increase mental abilities, to changes in how we communicate and relate to each other, to alien life forms. We have this incredibly diverse set of topics that get covered, all possibilities of the future, all things that have often stimulated us into thinking and doing and behaving differently. So it facilitates our evolution.

Well, one of the sources of modern science fiction is rather cheap, mass-produced magazine and dime novel stories that were written for young males a hundred, 150 years ago, simple adventure tales. So science fiction early on acquired a reputation for catering to the juvenile, to the simple-minded. But that was just one part of the heritage of science fiction.

Also part of the heritage of science fiction was H. G. Wells, and H. G. Wells was an extremely well-read, intelligent, articulate thinker, and a great writer too, who was definitely not simplistic or juvenile or trashy in his literature by any means.

Also, a lot of people's contact with science fiction is more through the movies than through literature. The movies, in general, tend to dumb things down in terms of plot and character. Not always, but lots of times, and they have formulaic series that aren't very intelligent.

But I always say to people: if you think science fiction as a form of literature is not up to snuff, then go read Dan Simmons' Hyperion, or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. I can present a list of tens and tens, into hundreds, of really intelligent, deep, great novels that have been written in the history of science fiction.

One of the premier science fiction writers of the 1940s and 50s was Theodore Sturgeon. Somebody once said to him that 90% of science fiction was junk, or trash, or whatever the word was. And Sturgeon replied: well, you know, 90% of everything is trash and junk, and science fiction is no exception.

So actually, in my life experience, a very well worked out science fiction novel or story is as intellectually challenging and mind-expanding as any kind of literature. In fact, it surpasses it. I mean, I've read Dostoevsky, so I know what great literature is, and it's not like I didn't thoroughly enjoy The Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment. Those are great novels. But so was Hyperion a great novel, and so was Star Maker. And so was, let's see, The Island of Dr. Moreau, a very fascinating, interesting novel. And the list goes on and on.

So yes, science fiction may have a reputation for not being good literature, for being juvenile, for being for young males. That is because of certain things about its history, and also because people focus on the movies and don't really spend much time looking at the great works of science fiction, of which there are many, many.

In fact, on my website I have a list of what, in my opinion, are the best science fiction novels ever written. It's on my Center for Future Consciousness website. So go look at it, pick out one or two or three or whatever, and read them. When you read them, you'll see: this is very deep, challenging, thoughtful, artistic stuff.

It is a ranked list. That's a personality trait of mine. Throughout all my life, I create lists and I rank things. My mind just goes in that direction. I just have to ask which of these I think is better, and in what order. So I did that, and it's ranked, but it does fluctuate. I keep revising it, so I sometimes change things around a bit.

Yeah. And it's not written in stone. After a while it becomes a bit ambiguous. Not ambiguous, that's not the right word. It's not as definitive as it might appear, because I could roughly say, well, these 10 are the best. But then the next 10, some people might think they're just as good, or maybe a little bit better, et cetera, et cetera. There's a bit of ambiguity in it. How do you differentiate between number 210 and number 250? Not very much, even though I put them in a certain order.

But there is a logic to the ones I have on top. At least in terms of my standards, there is a certain difference between the ones I have at the top and the ones I have at the bottom.

I also look at other people's lists. I've looked at lots of people's different lists of the best science fiction novels.

By the way, just to interject on that: the science fiction community has for a long time also had that habit, that desire to rank and award things. So they have the Hugo Awards every year, and the Nebula Awards every year, where they give out awards for the best novels: best, second best, third best, et cetera. And there are multiple, multiple websites out there with comparable lists that their creators have put together as well: best movies, best novels. So it's a common thing among people in science fiction.

Yeah. The first one that pops into my head, and this isn't necessarily in any order: do I remember that novel or story, or think about it, a year after I read it? Does it stay in my mind? Is it somehow something that grabs my attention and doesn't just go in one ear and out the other? There's something about it that stuck there.

Secondly, is it creative? Is it inventive? And of course, people pop up and think that they're being creative and inventive when somebody else has said it before. You have to have a sense of what has been written to make a decent judgment about whether a particular book really is inventive or creative.

A third thing is that it has interesting characters. The characters are done well, and there's a dramatic plot that's engaging in some manner or form. You could have all different kinds of plots, too: mysteries or comedies or adventures. So it's not like there's any one particular kind of plot here.

And I like stories that impress me as intelligent and rich in their portrayal of a reality. I mentioned them already, I'll mention them again: Hyperion and Snow Crash, for two examples. Or, to introduce another one, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is very rich and intricate in the detail of the reality that gets described. You can see a very thoughtful mind at work, creating these pictures of the future or of other planets.

And let's see, what other ones? Perhaps I've already covered this in what I said, but the word that pops into my mind here is insight. In particular: can you, through a story that flows and has interesting characters, generate some fundamental, deep, enlightening, novel insight into reality?

Now, it's not necessarily the case that every story has all those things. But the more of that it has, the more I would identify it as better, as ranking higher up there. The top of my list is Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, which is crazy and immense in scope: the entire future history of the universe and intelligence. Then Hyperion, which is based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and is very modern, rich and dramatic. And A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is a religious futuristic novel that's very moving at the end. And other ones on that list. If I were to go down the list, I would say: here are the qualities in each of these that make it such a good novel.

I would say that science fiction is important because it engages all of the dimensions of the human mind. It stimulates all the dimensions. It's not just insight. It stimulates one's imagination, it arouses one's emotions.

For example, to throw something in here: when we think about the future, when we imagine possibilities regarding the future, it's important to keep in mind that, as human beings, our most primordial reactions to the future are hope versus fear. Basic human emotions. Am I afraid of the future, or am I hopeful about it? So if one is to delve into our understanding and how we react to the future, it's important to address human emotion, because human emotion is a fundamental aspect of our consciousness of the future.

Where philosophy may just stimulate the intellect, or imagination, or even insight and intuition, and future studies may focus more on those qualities as well as the cognitive, science fiction addresses the entire spectrum of human consciousness. That's why science fiction is so valuable in our consciousness of the future, and why it's important to read and participate in the various mythologies, stories or narratives that good science fiction presents. It stimulates all aspects of the human mind and moves us along on all dimensions. People are not primarily moved, nor do they change, as a consequence of reason. They often change as a consequence of more fundamental psychological dimensions, like fear and hope.

So it's a mistake to try to reason people into a different way of thinking. Sometimes it works, but a lot of times it doesn't. But you can sure as hell move people if you can get them at an emotional level, which science fiction does.

So is insight in there? Is insight important? Yes, for sure. But so are all the other dimensions of the human mind. Science fiction is holistic, and that moves people more effectively, enlightens people more effectively, than just words and reason.

That's part of the reason why science fiction is also strongly associated with the [visual arts]. There's the whole history of science fiction art, and then science fiction cinema, adding in visualization as another dimension of the experience of science fiction: to see it as well as to read about it.

Let's go back to science fiction again. Science fiction is modern mythology. Mythology as a mode of consciousness goes back thousands upon thousands of years, predating recorded history. By the time you get to recorded history, you've already got lots of different mythologies.

Humans need to make sense of their existence, make sense of the world around them, give themselves something to motivate themselves. Our earliest mythologies were narratives, stories that provided meaning and purpose for us and were able to motivate and inform us: what was the good, what does this all mean, where are we going, where are we heading? The Egyptians and the Babylonians articulated mythologies. So did the Asian Indians. So did the Chinese, five, six, 7,000 years ago.

We need it. It is a capacity that emerged in the evolution of our consciousness at a certain point in time, to give us coherence, understanding, inspiration. We are storytellers, and so we tell stories about the universe and life and everything. This is what science fiction is now. This is our modern version of storytelling, to inform us and inspire us about where we're heading. What does it all mean? What is my role in it? What are the possibilities out there ahead of us?

And there is a history that goes both ways on this, in that society and culture, and what's going on in them, influence what gets created in science fiction. The fact that Kirk and Uhura kissed in Star Trek wasn't necessarily just somebody taking the lead. It was actually instigated by a growing sense of openness to human diversity, racial diversity, within mainstream culture. If they had done that 30 years earlier, it would not have been a reflection of the contemporary culture at that time, and people would probably have had a very different reaction.

So it both reflects the culture and influences it. It provides a lead, it provides direction. It goes around in a circle, and there are definitely lots and lots of examples of this.

There's a book that was written by a science fiction writer about 20 years ago, called The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. That book does a pretty good job of showing how, on numerous occasions, things that popped up in science fiction had an impact on people's minds and people's behaviors. Just like things that popped up in the ancient mythologies definitely influenced people's minds and their behavior.

So it's a loop, a loop running between the stories, the narratives, and the culture, and how the culture influences the stories. Right now, for example, we have lots of very pessimistic, dark and depressive stories that we tell. That's a reflection of what's in us. But even if it's a reflection of stuff in us, it's also feeding back on us and making us even more depressed.

A main thing I'm interested in, above and beyond science fiction and including it, is: how do we facilitate the future evolution of consciousness? And what does that mean? I think we need to do that, along multiple dimensions. Not simply to be smarter, but also to be wiser, to be more emotionally and motivationally constructive, to be able to expand our consciousness more toward the future. That's important. We don't do very well at that. Even though we do it, we don't do very well at it. And we forget history. We are continually forgetting history and having to recommit the same damn sins over and over and over.

So how do we evolve our consciousness? I think science fiction definitely is an expression of efforts in that direction, as well as a great stimulus for doing it.

I'll tell you, this is back to the "future of everything" issue. I mentioned in my books on the history of science fiction, actually in two of them, that H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, who were probably the two most influential science fiction writers ever, both believed that the key to a better future was not the evolution of our gadgets, but the evolution of our minds. That was going to save us, if anything did. That's what they focused on. So I think science fiction contributes to that, it addresses that.

And that's really where my thinking is right now. What I'm doing right now is concerned with the question: what would it mean to further evolve our minds? How does it fit into the big picture of things? How does science fiction contribute ideas to it? How do other people react to the notion that our human consciousness needs to evolve? It can't stay where it is. Is that doing us any good here? We create depressing, miserable images and cause lots of trouble for ourselves. And we keep thinking that somehow money and gadgets are going to get us out of this. But it's this that will get us out of it.

Yeah, there are other things besides science fiction. Understanding the discipline of human psychology, for example, will help us. Understanding evolution will help us, and seeing what that means. And, not to discount it, developments in technology and technological enhancement will help us.

Throughout our long-term human history, going back thousands and thousands of years, there have been numerous efforts from philosophy, psychology, humanistic thought, spirituality, meditation and other approaches that attempt, in various ways, to enhance or improve human consciousness. All of that is ongoing, and all of that needs to continue to be ongoing.

The future evolution of our consciousness is something that can be addressed from multiple disciplines, multiple perspectives, and science fiction is part of it, but not the totality of it. It's something we have been trying to do for thousands of years, maybe not so successfully, but for thousands of years we've been trying to make the human heart, the human mind, the human self better than before. And that's got to continue, with all of those areas contributing to it.

Yes. Well, I use the term consciousness as being synonymous, meaning the same thing, as awareness or experience. Just to start with, I use the three terms synonymously.

To define it, I would say that consciousness is the illumination or revelation of reality. Consciousness refers to the fact that not only is there a reality, but that reality is revealed or manifested. And it appears to me, and this is a point of debate for sure, that this revelation or manifestation occurs relative to a conscious mind, an individual conscious mind, the self. So I am conscious, as you are conscious, of yourself and the reality around you.

So consciousness seems to be connected to, and here I'm going to get a little bit deeper, a bit more abstract, the fundamental fact that in the universe in which we exist, there is a convergence of energy and information to complex observation points. I am a relatively localized consciousness embedded in an ambient surround, the cosmos. I am in it, and in fact it allows me to be aware of it.

One way that people sometimes put this point is that conscious minds, individual conscious minds, are the means by which the universe becomes aware of itself.

Let me go back and highlight that again. Consciousness seems to arise localized, focalized, in selves and I's and me's that are embedded in the universe, and yet are able to grasp and apprehend that which surrounds them and that which they are embedded in. So I am conscious here, but of all of this around me. I am aware of this around me, and of what's within me as well.

So consciousness could mean to know, to be cognizant. But there are levels or depths of consciousness too, because reality is very complex and indeterminately intricate. When I say I'm conscious of a cup, I am perceptually aware of it, but the depth of my consciousness of the cup can be shallow or extremely intricate. That is, consciousness is something that penetrates into this incredibly intricate reality that actually creates it.

So reality creates consciousness, but then consciousness is that which apprehends the reality that created it. It's like a mirror, a reflective mirror. That's another way to put it.

Yeah. Well, right now I'm in the middle of writing a multi-volume history of science fiction. I've got three volumes done, but there are a few more still to go, so that's a long-term writing project. I'm also doing an ongoing webinar series on the history of science fiction that derives from the books; you can link to it on the website.

I'm also going to be starting a series of short essays in my newsletter, Future Consciousness Insights, on this issue of the future purposeful evolution of consciousness. So I'm doing that. I frequently do Zoom presentations or podcasts, every month or two, if not more frequently. This summer, I'm going to the World Futures Studies Federation conference in Berlin, and I'm going to give a couple of talks there.

So I continue to write. The main themes are the ones I brought up at the beginning: future consciousness, that is, our consciousness of the future, science fiction, wisdom, and the connections between them. I write, give presentations and do webinars, sometimes things in person. And I'm starting up this project on why it's important for us to focus on evolving our conscious minds in the future.

When you asked the question about what paradigms need to be challenged, I'll throw out some for you. These are things that will require a great deal of discussion to really get a handle on and see what they mean, but I'll just throw them out.

Number one: I think a huge percentage of the population of the world still believes that there is something that is absolutely eternal, whereas I think the entire expanse of existence is all evolutionary. There is nothing absolutely eternal. I go back here to Heraclitus and his statement that the only thing that stays the same is that nothing stays the same. Well, I would say there is nothing which is absolutely eternal, even including the principle of evolution itself, which evolves. I think people still want to hang on to something they think is permanent and unchangeable, when reality, to its core, is dynamic and evolutionary. I think that's an important thing to get a handle on.

This is another philosophical one, and the first one is scientific too. The second one I've come across over the years, which I feel perpetually needs to be challenged in philosophy and science and spirituality and other areas: there are people who believe that everything is physical and material, the materialists. And there are people who believe that everything is mental, or consciousness. I think they're both wrong. I think there is both the physical and the dimension of the mind, or consciousness, and I think both of them are equally real and interconnected with each other, and you can't get rid of either one. Because I hear people say, everything's reducible to physical matter, or everything's reducible to consciousness. And in both cases I go: no.

I think that people who think there's a technological solution to our present-day problems, or who see the good life as facilitated by more gadgets and more contraptions, are making a mistake. I think we've got to turn our attention to, and I mentioned this one already, developing our conscious minds.

I think the idea that you could preserve nature in some kind of static harmony is ridiculous. Nature is evolutionary too. What we need to do is learn how to intelligently evolve it, not preserve it, because you can't preserve it.

I think the notion that we're absolute individuals is a blunder. We are individuals, but we're also interconnected.

I don't think that we should see ourselves as the pinnacle of creation. I think we're stepping stones to something else beyond us. That is, an ultimate goal of our self-evolution will be to transcend ourselves, to move to something else beyond ourselves.

And I think the notion of focusing on the present is infantile. That's what little babies do: focus on the present. You've got to take in the big picture of things, both our history and the possibilities of the future. It's focusing on the present that gets us [into trouble] half of the time.

So those are just some ideas, some paradigms, some points of view that I find, for different reasons, objectionable. And as I mentioned, it would take a while to go into each and every one of them.

I don't think we want to survive. I think we want to evolve. I think survival mentality is defensive, and it's unrealistic.

I'm not saying we should transcend our consciousness. We should transcend ourselves. That is, the kind of consciousness we possess should be at a more advanced, higher level than today. That is going to involve being more mentally healthy, more ethical, wiser, more expansive in reach.

Go back to the first point I made, which was that everything is evolutionary. If everything is evolutionary, then the realistic position to take on ourselves is that we have to see ourselves through the eyes of evolution. We can't keep things the same. They're either going to get worse or they're going to get better. They're going to go someplace, but they're not going to stand still. So what we need to focus on is evolving ourselves. Not thinking about survival, but evolving ourselves.

If we want to persist, we must grow. If we do not grow, we're not going to persist. We're going to calcify, we're going to petrify. It will fall.

Oh. To have significantly contributed to where we're going to be a hundred years from now. That what I wrote and thought about, in some way or another, helped you, a hundred years from now, to be at the point you're at.

Yeah. Thank you, sir. It's nice meeting you.