A portrait of the artist as a young dog, 1974
When I studied cultural anthropology during my time at to the National Museum of Man (as it was then called), I came across a phenomenon called geographical diffusion.
It attempted to account for the simultaneous appearance of an invention across cultures.
I never thought I would see what looks like a case of one, much less be a part of it.
If I’m right, this may be a process that more of us are involved in in the future – where the same invention or discovery appears in several places at once.
In preparation for the Reval, I was going through my papers, reorganizing them, and getting ready when I came across a file marked “Future History Project.” I hadn’t looked at it in decades.
I worked for a year at the National Museum, replacing a historian on leave, in 1973-4. During that time, I started a contemporary-conservation project that came to be known as the “Future History Project.”
The original idea as it occurred to me was: Why collect only scattered, orphaned, and ragged artifacts from 300 years ago when we could be collecting them new now?
We could give a well-rounded picture of the present to the future if we planned our contemporary collecting and carried it out when artifacts were freely available and new.
Around five years after I left the museum, in an incident that I’d long forgotten, the person I reported to sent me a bundle of material showing the interest that had been taken in our project by the Smithsonian Institution.
I had no recollection of the bundle. As I reread it, I began to feel special, puffed up, etc.
However among the articles the Smithsonian sent along were references to similar experimental future-history programs happening in DC, New York, Oakland, Bowling Green, Appalachia – why everyone seemed to be in on the show.
Moreover in their discussions, none acknowledged the National Museum. That suggested that their inspiration came from somewhere else.
Speak of connecting the dots, in a flash I was reminded of what the Divine Mother had said:
“There are, guaranteed, many, a multitude of beings upon the planet who, give or take a little, have been given the same inspiration.” (1)
So the Mother or her servants, the angelics, send out inspiration. And they send it out to many at the same time.
I also believe the idea enters the collective consciousness and is there drawn down by more folks. Who knows who will take it up?
The bow and arrow arising on several continents, the use of the horse, the wheel, coinage, boats, who knows how many inventions and innovations have been seeded to how many people at once?
Whatever the case, I discovered I may very well have been in the middle of this process at work – in this case, in a museum innovation. (2) I thought I was alone in this way of thinking and instead I found that numerous people around the continent had had a similar idea almost simultaneously.
I think this process may help explain other instances of simultaneous innovation we may see around us in the incredibly-changeful environment we’re about to enter.
If we see numerous versions of med beds, for instance, or free-energy devices, geographical diffusion may explain the simultaneous rise of those technologies.
Footnotes
(1) An Hour With An Angel – The Divine Mother: Welcome To ‘New Time’, http://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/01/27/divine-mother-welcome-new-time/.
(2) On the astral plane, museums have globes which allow us to magnify down to street level. Books come alive. One can time travel. So contemporary collecting is just one very small step to what’ll be possible in the future.