The analogue of what it is that freshness is bringing into being in the transcendent realm is whatever is thriving in the mundane. Thriving: flourishing, healthy, vibrant on-going-ness.
An analogue is a similarity in some points and not others between two things. The mundane is the world of material constraints and of inevitable mortality; the transcendent is not; an important dissimilarity.
To explore the similarities, let’s consider what thriving consists of in terms of individuals, institutions, communities, even civilizations.
One way to think about this is to ask this question: what that we now value in our world would we want to see in any future civilization succeeding ours, however distant in the future?
The presupposition is that the future is free, that is, unpredetermined as to form or finale. The present is the product of the past, but it actually produces new future, hour by hour, day by day. There is no contraction or convergence of all possibilities (even for me at my age.)
Any successor civilization that we could eventually adjust to and feel at home in would, of course, address our basic motives: survival, comfort, dignity, and the enabling agendas of profit, power and perpetuation. The specific systems at work and outcomes that result may be various.
Beyond these basics, however, on the platform level, two kinds of features need to exist for thrivingness: renewal and realization.
Renewal features include freedom, innovation and concord or reconciliation. Realization features include ideas and thoughts, decisions and investments. These make a matrix of elements which, in one shape or another, characterize anything thriving–individual, institution, community, civilization. See the thriving matrix here.
The best way to understand these features is to pair them up, one renewal with one realization.
So freedom in terms of ideas has to do with coming up with solutions, the generation of options, the play of speculation. In terms of decisions, freedom has to do with being able to think our way through to choices leading to outcomes we deem good. In terms of investments, freedom has to do with the self-discipline to actually follow decisions through to realization.
If, in any successor civilization, these modes of freedom are exercised, it will have one key feature of thrivingness.
Innovation is the introduction of new things and processes as adaptations and augmentations. With regard to ideas, this means actually imagining new things and new ways of doing things. With regard to decisions, innovation means designing and prototyping, producing or piloting actual new objects or processes. With regard to investments, this means putting money or effort into getting innovations adopted.
If any successor civilization innovates, then it has a second key feature of thrivingness.
Concord or reconciliation has to do with making peace between things which might otherwise be in conflict or seclusion. So related to ideas, this means research and investigation to determine facts. Related to decisions, this means courts or other forums of mediation. Related to investments, this means on-going efforts to build bridges across divides.
This is a third key feature of thrivingness. Altogether, they define the essential characteristics of any thriving society or other living thing in the mundane. They are also fundamental characteristics of what freshness is bringing into being in the transcendent.
Freshness doesn’t intervene in the mundane, so it doesn’t endorse any particular way of life or society. Freedom, innovation and concord or reconciliation are, however, aspects of the livingness of encounters, and in this way, freshness demonstrates how livingness can play out in the mundane.
As inhabitants of this particular mundane world looking ahead, the question we ask is: where do we go, and how do we get there from here. The answers are intellectual, social, political, historical. But if we keep encountering, and continue preserving freedom, engaging in innovation, and creating concord, we’ll have a civilization that will be, at least in part, worth wanting.