Imagine Introduction

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I once sat watching television with a friend while President Clinton exhorted us to build a bridge to the future.

'He's building a bridge to the future,' mused my friend. 'But are we really so sure we want to go there?'

I laughed when she said that, not only at her quirky humor but at her inimitable way of conveying a deeper truth that so often underlies a less serious one. The future is upon us, that's true. But what it looks like, none of us is all too sure.

I believe, as do most people I know, that beneath the economic giddiness and technological wizardry of America today, there is an underground psychic river of almost all-pervasive anxiety. The future does not seem as connected to the present as it once did. We feel that something big is about to happen, but none of us knows exactly what it is. Most significant of all, none of us can possibly know if this something is good or bad.

That is because the future is not fixed. The other side of the bridge to the future is not an objective, predetermined, static destination. In reality, it is a moveable object, a set of probabilities, and most important, a karmic consequence of the lives we lived yesterday and the lives we live today. The bridge to the future is a bridge that moves—and the land to which it is connected moves as well—according to how we walk across the bridge and who we are while we are walking.

Our thoughts about the future go far toward creating it; our minds and hearts are like filaments that connect today to tomorrow. They are conduits for either the status quo or the emergence of different, hopefully more loving, possibilities. How we think and how we behave determine where we are going.

Talmudic wisdom proclaims that over every blade of grass there stands an angel whispering, 'Grow! Grow! Grow!' I believe that extends to every moment as well. There are illumined thought forms that emanate from a divine source, guiding us, every moment, away from darkness and into light. The fact that we so often ignore these illuminations does not mean that they are not there. They are our thoughts of wisdom and conscience and love. They are our sense of goodness, the lure of becoming by which we are taken, though often kicking and screaming, in the direction of our healing. It is this illumined presence—in ourselves and others—that inspires us to hope. It carries the miraculous authority to reroute our bridges, individually and collectively, when the ones we have built are leading nowhere. That is because it has the authority to transform the human heart.

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