Are All the Seers Gone or Are We Simply Not Seeing Them? Seers are the movers and shakers bringing forth advancements in science, technology and business.
By Michael Mamas Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Don't we all long for a wise mentor? Perhaps we imagine that person sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch on a fine summer day. Or maybe we climb a mountaintop and find them sitting outside their cave. Then again, it may be the image of the wise, reflective grandmother whose every utterance is just what we needed to hear, like the Oracle in The Matrix. Do they still exist? Have we driven them all underground? Or perhaps we wouldn't recognize them if we saw them.
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We all have our idealistic notions of how a true visionary -- a great seer, a person with real knowledge -- would look and behave. Yet, as we toil through life, we never find such a person. Though we may know better, emotionally we can't let go of our idealized dream. If we were to meet a true seer in real life, they probably would fall short of our fanciful, idealistic notions, and we would walk away disappointed.
Science, for better and worse, has overtaken our world. For anything to be considered truth, it must be proven. This approach has served us well, resulting in fabulous technologies -- everything from airplanes to Air Books. But at what cost? Don't some things elude the grip of the scientific approach? Doesn't the nectar of wisdom, intuition and imagination require the awareness to be freed from stifling scientific reasoning? Imagine a level of life where insights and reflections unveil levels of truth beyond the grasp of the strictly rational mind. Aren't the seers, people of wisdom, who we all long to find and to become?
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It seems that the seers of our time have left their caves and front porches behind, and entered the modern-day, fast-paced world of daily business. Their wisdom, knowledge and insights have been swept into our modern-day world of materiality. They do not rely upon the strict, laborious, "prove it every step of the way" mentality of our almost virtual world. Yet, they bring their insights into the marketplace and become leaders in their fields.
To name possible examples of today's seers is to undermine the credibility of what is being said here. No example can live up to the preconceived notions of what people would expect of a seer. Some might consider Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet and Carl Icahn to be seers. But others judge them harshly. Gates couldn't prove the future of computers, yet he knew it. He could feel it. He could see it. Jobs, Buffett and Icahn are people who could see what others could not see. Though they couldn't prove it, they knew it so fully that they dedicated their lives to it. Just as with Marconi and Fulton, people at first considered them eccentric fools or worse. It was only after material proof existed that people were willing to listen.
In our modern age, most seers are acting as the central nervous system of our time, the movers and shakers bringing forth advancements in science, technology and business. They are bringing forth great advancements for all of civilization. At the same time, some seers prefer not to be part of the material world and choose to stay out of the limelight.
We might say that seers tend to be successful. The problem with that idea is that our notion of success and their notion of success can be diametrically opposed. The point is -- there is no checklist of criterion that you can use to identify a seer. That is true, almost by definition. Seers see what others do not.
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Seers don't follow any preconceived notions of where they should live, or how they should look, behave or speak. As a result, seers often go unrecognized as such, even if you should meet them. So, who is able to recognize seers when they see them, when they interact with them or when they hear them speak? People who pursue seers do so with their own biases, judgments, preconceived notions and expectations. If they really knew what a seer was, they would be one themselves.
To find wise, insightful, profound seers in the world, perhaps we first need to find the seer that dwells within all of us. The clear vision of that inner seer is required in order to identify the seers in this world. This article is not about how to identify a seer. Rather, it's an invitation to embark upon the journey to see beyond your own limitations -- those limitations that prevent you from knowing a seer, even when you see one.