Personal View

IT’S JUST LIKE US, WHEN asked "What will life be like in 2002?" to reel off all the technological toys we can think of. Even many of the most intelligent Americans have what amounts to a religious faith in technology-"religious," this time, meaning "proudly irrational." Each succeeding generation has more than wildly fulfilled the technological dreams of the previous generation; and each succeeding generation lives in a more difficult, more expensive and more frightening world. Still, plenty of us believe in a kind of technological Nirvana, the history of our century notwithstanding.

Well, far be it from me to criticize anyone's religion. It's just that I fail to see' much difference between a grimy, mad little jungle Jonestown, and a mass-produced, glossily entertained, drug-high, cancer-ridden, nuclear-threatened, computer-regulated - Jonestown. All the difference I can see is in scale, and in the classiness of the public relations.

But I'm, not as bleak as I seem. We were asked for predictions. What follows is, admittedly off the wall, but there's enough information now to indicate that these. predictions are possible. I hope that little Nina and her generation will find them worth living for, because included between my lines is the thought that these predictions, should even a portion of them come true, will transcend the thing that truly governs our lives now: not corporations, not governments, not even technology, but a pervasive, shared irrationality.

PSYCHIC HEALING'S VERY nearly accepted now, at most levels of our culture as the plain fact it is. This is a vast change in a short time. Only 18 years ago, had John F. Kennedy’s sister been a faith healer, he wouldn't have had a prayer of being elected President. Now psychics are proving accurate in predicting earthquakes, and police departments employ them to help catch fugitives. They are becoming our mental technicians- "technicians of the sacred" is what poet, Jerome Rothenberg called the ancients, and who knows that our psychics won't be the same?

As more is learned about psychics, their most common assertion will be taken more seriously. It is, simply, that everyone is psychic.

With in the next ten years I there will be a burst of psychic activity. It will be like jogging-one year nobody did it, the next year thousands are doing it. Thousands will start cultivating their psychic powers with the discipline and energy they now use for running. The techniques needed to develop psychic powers, which have been around for thousands of years, are being popularized in modem terms by various books and by groups - such as Lawrence LeShan's workshops. The changes artificially induced by the drugs of the '60s will be multiplied a hundredfold and God alone knows what happens then-for no doubt the darkness in our natures will have its say along with the light.

What will a race with heightened psychic powers mean to government, entertainment and industry? For humankind will be substantially not as we know it. All forms of governmental, and corporate secrecy will become obsolete. The. medical profession will be out of a job. Every form of media now known or imagined will be hopelessly antiquated.

Even the way we grow our foods would change: it's well-documented that in the community of Findhorn, in Scotland, huge healthy vegetables are made to grow in sand and in snow through, the psychic power of what the Findhom people call prayer. If this talent spreads across the world, it would mean the end of Third World dependence on American and Russian support. In short, the spread of psychic powers would be the end of "power" as we know it now.

Though it may seem impossible now, our last hundred years of history have proved that the word "impossible" isn't. applicable to any future.

WERNIER VON BRAUN PUT IT succinctly, and Einstein agreed completely: "Nature does not know extinction; all it - knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."

What would it do to our collective consciousness if some kind of life after death were scientifically confirmed? The researches of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross on people who have been pronounced dead and then revived and such phenomenon as

Kirilian photography indicate that within our lifetime some sort of afterlife will be widely accepted as scientific possibility.

Given that Von Braun and Einstein were right and that the soul continues after death, it must have some kind of plane or place in which to continue-then theoretically, at least, that place is discoverable, and proof is possible.

Aud if such proof were presented to this world? Reverberations would be fantastic. Our entire economy is based on getting as much as you can before you die. And on nothing more. Who knows what the prospect of eternity might do to it,? On the dark side, our military strategists would have the opportunity to value life even less than they do now. On the side of light-who knows? If there is a next life, perhaps there have been past lives, and perhaps they influence our present as much or more as the accidents of our infancy-a concept that by itself would scuttle most psychological theories.