Are You Ready to Remember Your Future?
the ‘Art of Dreaming’
is the power to remember the future.
Are you ready to
Remember your Future ?
by Stefano D’Anna
In every epoch, remarkable men blessed with determination and unshakeable trust in themselves, endowed with a prodigious sense of intuition, have found capital to accomplish their impossible endeavours. Colombo believed that going west was a short cut to east. President Juscelino Kubitschek ordered the transfer of the Federal Capital from Rio de Janeiro, and carved Brasilia out of the Amazon rain forest in 2.000 days. Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps dug out 100 miles of sandy desert to build the Suez Canal. Scipio rebuilt the Roman army and saved Rome when he was only ninteen years old, after the terrible defeat of Cannae, where the Romans lost 100.000 men in one battle.
The greatest social and scientific achievements, and anything beautiful, useful, and true are the splendid gift to humanity of one individual – never two or a legion; they are the present from one of these visionary men – divers into the invisible. To their glowing madness we own all that we have and are. Studying their lives, words and deeds, I have asked myself where their sense of certainty, their unshakeable trust in themselves could possibly have come from. From where did they get the strength and self-confidence to conceive of and undertake their impossible missions? Did it come from culture, family, education, or from somewhere else?
Through observation of someone like my friend Alphan Manas, Founder of the Futuristic Association, the mastermind of ingenious and complex enterprises, and the great entrepreneur and philanthropist George Koukis, who bought a bankrupt company against all experts’ advice, and led it to worldwide dominance, and my encounters with other remarkable individuals of this kind, the impression was raised in me that, in some arcane way, they seem to know the happy ending of their ‘life-movie’. As impossible as it may appear, they seem endowed with the mysterious power to ‘remember the future’.
Believe in order to See.
Believing and seeing are one and the same thing, but divided by time – like dream and reality. In time, we will see all that in which we have believed, and realize all that we have strongly dreamed of and had faith in.
When the day came for the inauguration of the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, a project in which Walt had strongly believed and that was accomplished after his death, in response to the sad statement of a journalist: “ what a shame that your father is not here to see…”, Diane Disney answered: my father already saw, else all this would not be here.”
Time is a paint invented to make visible that which is invisible to ordinary people’s eyes. Or better, it is a shock absorber which protects humanity from what they are not yet ready to see. Decades had to pass before the dream of freedom nurtured by Rosa Parks, M. Luther King, Jr. , Malcom X, and all of the black leaders who died young could pierce the smoke screen of centuries-old prejudices and become acceptable and then visible. As all true dreamers, they had the capacity to compress time and remember the future – seeing what all others would see and accept only many years later.
Believing before seeing is the mental watershed that is confronting mankind with a crossroad: on one side there is the large mass of those who need to see in order to believe; and on the other side, there is a handful of men of faith – who know that their belief shapes reality, and have to believe in order to see. These men sustain the world.
Ordinary men will still continue to call themselves humans for who knows how long, and continue to believe that they belong to one and the same breed without realizing that in reality there are two species – living side by side but marked by a different destiny.
“If a man who believes in himself takes a step into the unknown, unfailingly, he will see the ground appear beneath his feet, to prove that his shining madness is right… Believe in order to see, never vice versa!”
The Fear of the Unknown.
Humanity thinks and feels negatively. As a mass, it has neither dreams nor utopias – but only negative imagination and prophecies of misfortune. The crowd is a machine which is influenced by everything. I does not have a faith or a free will, and cannot create anything. Above all, it cannot imagine anything new, much less accept it. Masses are status quo worshippers, fearing the unknown and all that is unfamiliar. The fear of the new unsettles and blinds them. That is why they cannot dream and they are condemned to the hell of seeing in order to believe.
This explains why the leading spirits of humanity have always experienced a recurrently fierce, violent opposition from the masses. The world they envisage, is invisible to the masses, so eluding and scaring them. The vastness of their ideas, their unshakeable trust in themselves, the breadth of their vision, and their integrity, put us in front of ourselves and this comparison is so painful that instead of changing ourselves to be more and to become better, we prefer to eliminate the basis of comparison.
Future Leaders for the World.
Throughout history, change never comes from a system of beliefs, a philosophy, a revolution, or a political party. Change only comes through the personal effort of a single, resolute individual. For the future of the world, for its economic growth and human development , there is a need for a new breed of visionary leaders driven by ethics and integrity capable of dreaming the impossible, attracting great ideas, and having the responsibility for believing and committing their lives to them. There is no school – no mentor who has taught us the most important thing in life: the art of dreaming, the visionary power to believe before seeing.
The Myth, the Dream, the impulses of the heart and the capacity to believe before seeing have built our civilization, and in the construction of the future they will continue to preceed any evolution or progressive change. Icaro will forever come before the Mongolfier and the Wright brothers, and his wings, apparently so frail, have caused the air to shake millennia before the engines of modern Boeing and Jumbo jets.
First you have a dream
then you believe in it
Third you see it come true.
Stefano D’Anna