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people who do have the Seventh Sense. Even, | think, by people who are reading this
book.
Why start this journey into the churning, still-confusing and affronting world
around us now by the shores of Lake Taihu? Why begin with the sentiments of a
slower culture that Master Nan embodied, passed like delicate and still-warm tea,
with so much calm in the face of all this urgency? It’s not only because of Master
Nan’s insight that this world is tearing at our minds, that the faster we move the
sicker we'll get. It’s something else. The training of an instinct, of a really fresh way
of looking at the world, demands a kind of calm. Understanding of anything, after all,
is most durably assembled in slow conversations, in patient probing. It is developed
as much from brushes with music and literature as it is from any direct, slamming
confrontation with the truth. The birth of an instinct requires a rewiring of our
minds, a reframing of our hopes, and this can only be done at the pace of
contemplation. (It’s the best way to keep the fear at bay.) We seek those stilled,
freeze-framed moments where we'll pause amid lightspeed fast networks to think
about why they work and just what they are doing to us. Tranquility, fora moment
at least, in the face of the alternately horrible and wonderful way the world is being
remade. That’s what you'll get here, in the following pages. Nan’s model statesman
Su Qin, knife stabbed into his own thigh and slouched with exhaustion is a sort of
totem for us. Knife in thigh. Stop. Think. Even, hard as it may be, wait for the right
path to present itself. No matter how uncomfortable it may be at times, it is better to
be unconventional than conventional in our revolutionary age. This is the only way
to cultivate a Seventh Sense. The old methods will not teach you a new way.
Let me tell you what is going to happen: In coming years there will be a struggle
between those who have the Seventh Sense - who are born with it or trained to it -
and those who don't. New, network forces all around us will take on old, established
ones - they already are - in business, politics, warfare, science. Then - because
those who don’t have the Seventh Sense for network power will lose, as anyone who
tries to stop the future always loses - a new age will begin. This age will involve
violent, historic wrestling between different groups with different versions of the
Seventh Sense.Competing interests and ideals and aims will fire these contending
forces. Networks will fight networks. Some of the plans of these connected age
groups will be good, others evil, and anyhow the winners will be ruthless. Then, and
this is where it will get particularly strange and incredible, there will be a battle
between those with the Seventh Sense and the very systems of connection,
machines and intelligence they have built. Human instincts laid in competition
against the machine instincts. That struggle? I’m not quite sure how it will turn out.
But for now, at least, we can say this: The future sits almost like a cold-eyed dare in
front of us. Just try to avoid this!
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