Techistential (Strategic Foresight & Sustainable Futures) reposted this
Chair Disruptive Futures Institute | President of Techistential (Climate & Foresight Strategy) | VC Investor & Board Member | Bestselling Author
🐰 Disruptions Reflecting into Constants Thoughts around change, constants, hallucination and delusion? In 1937, Salvador Dalí painted two of his most famous surrealist paintings: The Metamorphosis of Narcissus and Swans Reflecting into Elephants. ➡️ The Metamorphosis of Narcissus: The two images in the painting reflect Narcissus both before and after his transformation. Dali’s double images derive from his fascination with hallucination and delusion. ⏩ Swans Reflecting into Elephants: Using the same technique as for Narcissus, the Swans painting has a similar setting (the Catalonian landscape from where Dalí is originally from) and also uses double images and visual illusions (his paranoiac-critical method). These paintings are symbolic, but we can draw parallels about the delusion and illusion of changes being different from constants. They are one of the same, each reflecting on the other, indistinguishable. Systemic disruptions are constants, just as their reflections are. To imagine a life absent of disruption is a hallucination or delusion as well. With disruption being a steady state, as opposed to isolated or single, recurring events, is there a difference between changes and constants? Have we been misled into an illusion of stability, predictability, and certainty - a world free from constant disruption? In Japanese, mujō means impermanence: everything and everyone is constantly changing. Impermanence is called Anicca in Pali, the sacred language of Theravāda Buddhism. Anicca is an essential doctrine shared in Buddhism and Hinduism. 💬 Here life itself is comparable to a river that appears to have continuous and unified flow, but it is never the same water. It is the same concept of impermanence when the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that “…no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he’s not the same man.” To appreciate the paradoxes of constants being a reflection of disruptions, we can revisit Herman Hesse who describes how Siddhartha discovers the secret that life flows like a river: “... eternally the same and yet new at every moment!” So nothing is permanent but impermanence. This philosophical problem fleshes out a great paradox, as impermanence is permanent - while at the same time everything is in constant change - with the absence of continuity or permanence. As we dive into life, whether there are changes, or constants, or changing constants or constant changes, they are one and the same. 💡Armed with an understanding of the eternal nature of change, our response to disruptions becomes our response to life itself. As we embrace change, we are actually embracing the reflection of constants, of our humanity. Paintings: “Metamorphosis of Narcissus" (Tate Gallery, London, UK) and “Swans Reflecting Elephants”, by Salvador Dali, 1937. #change #constants #life #art Nae Hayakawa Disruptive Futures Institute Techistential (Strategic Foresight & Sustainable Futures)