In the years immediately following publication of our book, Strategy of the Dolphin, Paul Kordis and I took great delight in staging one “how to think like a dolphin” seminar after another.

If you attended one of those three-day events, mostly in the Colorado Rockies, you will probably remember the great delight that the two authors/presenters (and, we had plentiful evidence to suggest, our participants, too, ) got from the seminar’s closing ceremony.

On the stereo, we keyed up Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Then distributed glasses of chardonnay or apple cider. And after that, invited everyone in the room to join us in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink toast that went on longer than the Declaration of Independence (with the speaking parts frequently interrupted by the lofting of glasses, of course!).

One of our self-congratulatory accolades in behalf of everyone present (and the rest of the planet’s citizens) called attention to the pure joys of being a sapient life form, perhaps the only one in the universe.

Providing ceremony for a “rite of passage”
We toasted expanding knowledge and thinking skills, especially those of the people there in the room doing all the toasting.

We saluted our responsibilities for making good things happen, and our renewed hopes that they would produce better and better outcomes. Eventually, we got around to hailing the feature that makes we humans so very, very effective when we use it to great advantage: our abilities to get things done by cooperating.

This closing event at the seminar was good sayonara fun with a serious undertow. With everyone’s best intentions at full mast, we sought to hammer home one more absolutely vital idea: We wanted our participants to appreciate that taking up the mantle of the dolphinthinker is a genuine rite of passage.

Once any of us buys into the dolphinthinker’s toolkit of new mind skills, expanded ethos/worldview/narrative and Moses-like (“promised land”) overlook, there really isn’t any going back.

Relentless change brings its own army of apparitions
This has always been the case during the thirty-plus years that Dr. Kordis and I have been tracking the emergence of the dolphin mind in individuals. It’s a reality that we expect to remain unchanged. As we keep reminding anyone within earshot, because of the relentless, sudden bulk-up of the Anti-Certainty Attractor, there’s a towering tsunami of game-changing uncertainly incoming. And, as we prepare for it, moving into dolphin-thinking waters has automatically made you a member of the Anti-Certainty Attractor Ghostbusters corps.

That “Ghostbusters” reference is telling, of course. It suggests that Dan Akkroyd’s and Harold Ramis’s 1984 sci-fi comedy film of that name is one of Paul and my favorite movies, which it is (chalk it up to a certain peculiar aesthetic quirkiness mutually held!)

But once again there is a serious point not to be missed: Nothing is more likely to tilt your use of the dolphin’s thinking skills toward successful outcomes than being able to distinguish between what is real and possible and pragmatic—doable—and what is ghostly, fanciful and even phantasmagorical in times of relentless change.

The final chapter of LEAP! is a kind of toast, too
As it hurls you and me toward an endless barrage of sensorial data, information and misinformation, the Anti-Certainty Attractor will see to that.

The world’s need for ghostbusters is acute, and growing. I had all that in mind when I wrote the final chapter, “Next,” for LEAP! How to Think Like a Dolphin & Do the Next Right, Smart Thing Come Hell or High Water. That chapter is nothing more and nothing less than observations, cautions, tips and insider’s “intel” from the dolphinthinkers’ own spook corps that struck me as significant. Things that the Anti-Certainty Attractor ghostbusting volunteer needs to be sure are never absent from his or her mind for very long.

If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll take a look before long at my musings on issues and ideas that people who wish better ways and better days for the world and all who reside in it need to keep at the forefront of their minds. It, too, is a toast of sorts—to a new kind of potential sitting there undiscovered and undeveloped in billions of people on the planet. We dolphinthinkers can’t “will” it to appear in others, but we can help nurture the ideas and instrumentalities that can “give it legs” in the minds of those we influence most.