45 – We are creating our Future with the wrong Paradigm …
Thursday, December 15th, 2011When I was a young boy, I somehow managed to rebel against everything that wanted to control me. My Body, I had no choice; it was owned by my parents and by the physical processes of growing up. But my Mind, That I wanted to be completely mine; free of the set ideas of others; free to explore the world beyond the limitations of my organic senses; free of the dominance of the distorted core ideas under which we have come to understand Reality.
The Western mind has selected the ideas of a handful of brilliant and courageous men, and somehow twisted them to fabricate a Paradigm based on conflict, division, control: Jesus’ message of Love has been turned into Divisiveness and Hate; Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am)” into a tool to ‘separate’ what is indivisible; Bacon’s “Knowledge is Power” into control over Nature to remake the world as we desire; Newton’s measurability of Natural Laws … gravitation, motion, conservation of energy … into a vision of a meaningless and machine-like Universe, Darwin’s survival of the fittest into the greediness of might makes right.
Yet there is Order, and Creativity, and Empathy, and astonishing Beauty struggling to surface everywhere amidst the devastating power of our Paradigm.
Wanting to find a more realistic view of our world, I read hundreds of books. And through them I got introduced to ideas I was not supposed to contemplate; ideas that challenge the premises of our dreadful Paradigm; like Aristotle’s ideas that nothing is isolated and complete in itself and that everything is involved in a Process we have the capacity to comprehend; or Carl G. Jung’s idea that our Unconscious often knows more than our Conscious, thus compelling us to consider the primal knowledge of the Unconscious; or David Bohm’s idea of an Implicate Order in which each element is to be understood, not as something independent and permanent but rather as a product formed in the flowing movement of Nature and ultimately dissolved back into it; or the postulates of Quantum Field Theory that demonstrate that every Body … every physical system in Nature … modifies or is modified by the space which surrounds it with a relative degree of freedom in adaptation.*
And so, I’ve come to see a side of Nature that the dominant Paradigm does not want us to see: The creative, progressive, beautiful, yet oftentimes cruel side of Nature that KNOWS how to put our bodies together … atom by atom, cell by cell … and then release us into the flowing movement of Life with a degree of freedom to build our own roads; roads that might become the highways of the future.
* Monarch Notes: The Philosophy of Aristotle. C G Jung: Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle. David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Wikipedia (synthesis from Quantum Field Theory).
Revised August 2018
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