people who do have the Seventh Sense. Even, | think, by people who are reading this book. Why start this journey into the churning, still-confusing and affronting world around us now by the shores of Lake Taihu? Why begin with the sentiments of a slower culture that Master Nan embodied, passed like delicate and still-warm tea, with so much calm in the face of all this urgency? It’s not only because of Master Nan’s insight that this world is tearing at our minds, that the faster we move the sicker we'll get. It’s something else. The training of an instinct, of a really fresh way of looking at the world, demands a kind of calm. Understanding of anything, after all, is most durably assembled in slow conversations, in patient probing. It is developed as much from brushes with music and literature as it is from any direct, slamming confrontation with the truth. The birth of an instinct requires a rewiring of our minds, a reframing of our hopes, and this can only be done at the pace of contemplation. (It’s the best way to keep the fear at bay.) We seek those stilled, freeze-framed moments where we'll pause amid lightspeed fast networks to think about why they work and just what they are doing to us. Tranquility, fora moment at least, in the face of the alternately horrible and wonderful way the world is being remade. That’s what you'll get here, in the following pages. Nan’s model statesman Su Qin, knife stabbed into his own thigh and slouched with exhaustion is a sort of totem for us. Knife in thigh. Stop. Think. Even, hard as it may be, wait for the right path to present itself. No matter how uncomfortable it may be at times, it is better to be unconventional than conventional in our revolutionary age. This is the only way to cultivate a Seventh Sense. The old methods will not teach you a new way. Let me tell you what is going to happen: In coming years there will be a struggle between those who have the Seventh Sense - who are born with it or trained to it - and those