Wow. I'm experiencing a tingling mixture of shock and glee right now. I just read a Forbes article about American musician Beck whose latest idea will undoubtedly be seen as a major moment in music for years to come. This is exactly what philosopher of science David Deutsch would call "The Beginning of Infinity" - 
that moment in the Jackson Pollock movie when Marcia Gay Harden's character says, breathlessly, "He's blown the whole thing wide open"… 

Yep. Beck is releasing sheet music as his album. Sheet music only, as a kind of road map. And he's inviting his fans to create albums themselves according to this road map.  The result? Potentially millions of interpretations the world over, an explosion of creativity based on this one atomic piece of "code", so to speak.  
Is that Marshall McLuhan I hear applauding in his grave? 

"Open-source"  is the new black, apparently.  Numerous lectures at the most recent TEDGlobal conference played on this theme, with applications as varied as the car rental business, power generation, the creation of public art, political protest, and the invention of customized transport machines.  Networks.  The internet is finally revealing its staggering potential.  It seems that, as a species, we are discovering that cooperating is almost always more advantageous than competing, and that many minds are far more powerful than a select few. This is big. 

And it represents a massive ideological shift.  A shift that, in my opinion, has deeply spiritual implications. 

As Westerners deeply immersed in the prevailing capitalist 'memes',  we can't help but feel in the midst of a race or contest. We want to own things and rush to stake claims. Land, resources, ideas.  We - individuals, companies, nations - believe these are limited and guard them fiercely. They define us, they support us, we must protect them at all costs! 

But the thing is, oil is just oil. It will one day be exhausted.  Ideas, and the minds from whence they spring are creation machines - their potential is limitless. 
They are, as in Beck's album, the "beginning of infinity".  And when we build walls around ideas, we cut off the very thing that could infinitely improve or expand them - other minds. 

Beck and many other genii are realizing that when we are competitive and possessive with knowledge,  guarding ideas as though they were finite resources, we miss that larger collective boon that is possible if we share - a 'capital' so much more valuable to so many more people that it would be nothing short of a leap forward in human evolution.  I'm not saying Beck's album is going to save the world, but open-sourced medical technology via 3D-printers just might.  If anything can, it's a  non-competitive, collaborative state of mind.  What a radical way of thinking compared to the last hundred and fifty years of Western civilization! 

"So what does this have to do with my heart?" you may ask…

Don't we build walls around ourselves in the same possessive way?  Isn't this precisely the story of "ego"? Don't we stake claims in the world similarly - chasing something - success, fame, respect, wealth, love - all to buttress this sense of "self" or "I", to save it from dissolution which is of course, inevitable? This panicked quest drives much of the action in the world today.  Yet ironically, the more fanatically an ego exerts itself, defines itself, and draws borders around itself, the more depleted and isolated it becomes.  Just like imprisoned ideas, when we enclose ourselves in this way,  we are cut off from something infinitely, transcendentally larger.  While clinging tightly to the story of our egos, our lives may seem to be progressing but a whole world of massive potential is being missed - it's there, available, but not being accessed. 

Until, perhaps, now. The forces of transparency, collaboration and openness that are growing today are the outer manifestation of an inner consciousness change, and a profound one.  A collective 'heart' is opening. Cautious hands are being outstretched, eyes are peering out from around the barricades. Strangers are trying to trust each other. 

As a musician and artist, I'm allowed to say these flowery things, but I say them here with total sincerity.  Maybe the grave crises looming all around us are the necessary catalysts for such an opening, but I'm guessing that most people you know are sensing this dawning, irrepressible dissatisfaction with 'me-against-you' - with the very idea that we should consider each other as separate, fundamentally, at all. 

Isn't this what the environmental movement is all about? The holistic movement in medicine? No part is separate from the whole? We are embedded in the world, enmeshed with each other, just as the flower is a collaboration of phenomena - air, soil, rain, etc. and not simply an isolated object like the noun we use to describe it.  
This is anathema to cult of personality - to the ego-driven model of the world and how to be in it.

Which brings me back to Beck. A simple, open invitation that blurs that fiercely guarded line between artist and fan, creator and consumer. Compare the spirit of this offering to the golden age of rock stars... If such a glittering sphinx can emerge from the ashes of that broken empire we called 'the music industry', what does the future hold for democratic governments, corporations, civilization in general?  To open-source all of human potential is to discover an inexhaustible supply, the oil-field that will never, ever dry up. So, it seems the saviour we've been waiting for isn't a great American president, a prophet, a technological advance, or a vaccine..... it's each other. 

Hmm, that sounds like a song we should all write together.