“We are faced with a breakdown of general social order and human values that threatens stability throughout the world. Existing knowledge cannot meet this challenge. Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach. I am suggesting that the very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. The source of our problems is within the structure of thought itself.”

David Bohm, Theoretical Physicist,
the individual Einstein believed was his intellectual successor.

Touch the Future began over twenty years ago. The vision was to help parents and those who care about children respond in the best possible way to the dramatic changes in the environment we call childhood, changes that exploded after World War II. We did not have the internet then. Social media and mobile phone-computers did not exist. The dangers that television represented are now compounded many times with ‘screen time’ replacing living, breathing relationships. Technology in the early classroom was just creeping in. Levels of autism, emotionally challenged youth and other pathologies were significantly lower but on the rise. Play deprivation was high with adult organized activities replacing free-range spontaneous play. The impact of hospital-technological birth on mother-infant-father attachment continues. Global warming with the threat of mass global extinction, including homo sapiens was a distant dream.

What if the way we treat our child is the way our child will treat the world? And what if you and I are not all that different from other parents so our child is like theirs and that is the way the world will be?

Around the 12th to 14th c. B.C. Hermes Trismegistus proclaimed, as above so below. That which is above is the same as that which is below. “Macrocosmos is the same as microcosmos. The universe is the same as God, God is the same as man, man is the same as the cell, the cell is the same as the atom, the atom is the same as... and so on, ad infinitum." Human behavior is fractal by nature. A fractal is a pattern that repeats at every scale. We create the future by the way we behave now. Wow! Each of us is responsible for the way humanity is and will be. Everything we do matters and Carly Elizabeth doesn’t miss a stich.

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world, to a large or small extent, has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime, guilt ~ and there is the story of mankind. John Steinbeck, East of Eden, 1952

Breastfeeding bonding and baby-carrying bonding are the first events of life, which the newborn/infant/child learns about love and non-violence. Love is first learned at the breast of mother and by being carried on her body ~ like in utero, where the first lessons of being connected with mother are learned.

As we continue Joe develops a number of themes all centering on the long term consequences of not being nurtured. ‘The child who is nurtured and bonded and given that safe space from the earliest developmental period can move away from the safe space carrying that same state of mind with him and is ready to move on into the higher realms of human possibility.  Whereas the majority of us lacking that safe space never move on. We try to repair or build for ourselves the safe space to be.  It’s a safe space that we either carry with us and are - or not at all, yet we are trained to believe we can create the safe space by following all the appropriate cultural directives and every cultural directive drives us into an ever increasing unsafe positions and we feel more and more threatened by the world.’ Here again, Joe turns our cultural assumptions upside down. Rather than culture being the sanctuary it pretends to be, culture is the source of our greatest trauma and pain.

Michael Mendizza

Continuing to focus on the way culture shapes our reality Joe notes: ‘One of the things that culture brings about is the idea that without its guiding filters we would be like beasts in the forest, savage, uncivilized, murderous, etc. The truth of the matter is, culture is what makes us savage, vicious, murderous, war after war after war because of the restrictions and restraints imposed by culture. Both neural scientist James Neal and Alan Shore question: “Will we survive the current situation?” And both Neal and Shore, said “Only if we can produce males capable of nurturing their offspring.” And this sets the stage for a radically different view of the nurturing role of males.

Michael Mendizza

One of the most deeply penetrating insights that emerge from Joe’s vision of imagination is how it manifests as both our individual self-image or ego and the culture we live in. One is a personalized micro view and the other a collective macro view of essentially the same field, each giving rise to the other. The Greek word persona comes to mind, persona being the cultural mask our authentic nature wears. We must conform to culture to belong and therefore survive and by doing so we limit and constrain our true nature and potential. Here rests another pillar in Joe’s overarching framework.

Michael Mendizza