Wildlife Rescue Series!

Time Magazine released its list of the world’s 100 most influential people this week, along with profiles of leaders in each category: Leaders and Revolutionaries; Heroes and Pioneers; Scientists and Thinkers; Artists and Entertainers; Builders and Titans. I read the whole article–59 pages–in one sitting, and came away with an idea.

See, the way my brain works, everything is connected. So when I read about these phenomenal filmmakers, CEOs, authors, philanthropists, technology gurus, Internet wizards and bloggers, politicians, scientists, comedians and everyday heroes all at the same time, my brain needed the collection to add up to something, to tell a story. That’s what my brain does: it makes stories out of the apparently unconnected.

So this is a letter for Al Gore of An Inconvenient Truth; Steve Jobs of Apple; Rhonda Byrne of The Secret; Oprah Winfrey of just about everything; international gamer Fatal1ty and Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto; Lonelygirl15 producer Miles Beckett and YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen; Philip Rosedale, builder of Second Life; and Pony Ma, creator of China’s Internet community QQ:

The most powerful people in the world understand that what you focus on grows and becomes your reality. My driving instructor put it very simply back when I was 17: “Where you look, you go.” Just try driving straight ahead while you’re gazing off to the left. Actually, don’t try it. But you get my point. And the more your focus occupies the totality of your being–mind, body, spirit–the more powerful a creator you become. Where you look, you go.

I read recently about a video game that lets players try to bring peace to the Middle East. What I want to know, Time 100, is whether we could use interactive, user-driven media to REALLY bring peace to the Middle East. And Darfur. And solutions to the planet’s environmental problems. Peace and safety to suffering and endangered animals. Healing to the ill. Food to the hungry. Abundance to the poor.
If we connect The Secret to video games, for example, especially Wii, where the players are physically engaged in the game, aren’t we looking at practising (at least at the levels of mind and body) a certain way of being?

So couldn’t we practise peace and environmental problem-solving? If it’s a game we’re playing, theoretically, this could be fun.
And couldn’t we do it in multi-gamer situations? From a spiritual perspective, it’s believed that when several people are gathered together for a common purpose, the power of that gathering is even greater than the sum of the individuals’ power. To put it in the vernacular, two minds (or more) are better than one. Imagine whole online communities of people from all over the globe working together in cyber-reality to solve the biggest “problems” of our time. And they’re playing. They’re having fun. They don’t make decisions out of fear, because the consequences play themselves out in pictures and pixels only, and dire results can be changed with the click of a mouse. The freedom to make mistakes, learn from them, and then practise something better–ideal.

What if we connected The Secret to Second Life? Gave people with life-threatening illnesses the opportunity to create avatars of themselves, see themselves healthy again in real time, in life size. To move freely, to run and jump and play again. What if?

There are people in the Time 100 list with a vision that could carry the world and all of us in it forward together to a better way of being, individually, in community, in our international relations and in our relationship with the world herself. In fact, many of them share a similar vision. What we need to do now is make it “real”–words, pictures, online videos, avatars, games–and make it available for all of us to play with, practise with, become accustomed to, share, inhabit … make Real.

Where you look, you go. Time 100, together you can provide both the roadmap and the vehicle. There are millions of us who will be only too happy to get in and drive. And I’m willing to bet that when we do–enough of us, for enough time–we will find that what we practise over and over again in cyberspace becomes manifest in the space all around us. Becomes real.