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see the the whole ox. Nowadays, | meet the ox with my mind and spirit rather than see it.”"4 The butcher was not looking at his work; he was feeling the energy of the task. “A good cook goes through a knife in a year, because he cuts,” the butcher concluded. “An average cook goes through a knife in a month, because he hacks. I have used this knife for nineteen years. It has butchered thousands of oxen, But the blade is still like it's newly sharpened.” He was cutting not with his knife, but with an instinct - and the result was the highest form of mastery: accomplishment with nearly no effort. This our our aim: To see the world with our mind, not our eyes. So much of what will affect us in the future is invisibly stashed on a connected landscape we're only now learning to feel. It will emerge from the complex, adaptive sea of links expanding around us. We must tune our own instincts for this power, which will make our moves almost effortless. The ever-sharp mental knife laid upon the thick challenges of a new age. There will be moments ahead for all of us - the most dangerous or terrifying or wonderful ones - in which things will happen that none of our old ideas or senses can help us understand. The truly new. We've had previews of such moments often enough in recent years: innovative devices, surprise attacks, unexpected and permanent economic quakes. A cracking of the old physics of wealth and power is underway around us, largely invisible to most of us, except perhaps in its strange and unnatural effects: everywhere terror, instant billionaries, the failure of ideas and institutions, millions of migrants loosed and drifting across old borders, but tethered to deeper fields of connection, data, and ideology. The Seventh Sense is the ability to see why this is happening. And to use what you see. This is not merely about brain power or sharpened intellect; it’s about a gut reaction. Just as the demand for liberty or industry was once invisible and insensible to an age accustomed hundreds of years ago to feudal, agricultural habits, so we're likely blind to urgent pressures of our own. Surely you've felt this creeping anxiety yourself, the exciting nausea of movement coming from you know not where? The ability to sense and feel the deeper chord changes of history has, always, been the decisive mark of leadership and success in revolutionary periods. Consider, for instance, Charles, the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel who faced down Napoleon on the fields of Jena in what is now central Germany in October 1806. Brusnwick-Wolfenbuttel was then 71 years old. He was considered one of the most courageous soldiers of his age, with a record of astonishing victories. He looked over the sun-dappled fields along the Saar river on that fall day and saw nearly certain victory in the coming battle. He had Napoleon outmatched two soldiers to one. His men were masters of the subtle techniques of Frederick the Great, tactics that had delivered victory in far more perilous moments. But Napoleon, less than half the Duke’s age at 37, stared across the same undulating land, the same poised armies and saw in the landscape something completely 4 When I started butchering: I’ve finessed the always-unstranslatable Zhuangzi. See for reference Burton Watson, Burton, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968) 14 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018246