When 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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For thousands of years Humanity has striven to find answers to the questions immortalized by the artist Paul Gauguin in one of his most beautiful paintings:

• Where do we come from?
• What are we?
• Where are we going?

My well-researched yet tentative answers to these questions are:

• Where do we come from? We emerge more or less pre-designed yet endowed with a relative degree of freedom to adapt and change, out of the same Primordial Substance into which we ultimately return.
• What are we? We are highly complex congregations of myriad living components temporarily fused together into the phenomenon we call Self.
• Where are we going? Our body … the physical congregation of components … ultimately dissipates back into the Primordial Substance (environment!) from which it came into existence. But the Self (the Soul, the Mind, the Operator, the Creator, the Architect, the Force that gives us the capacity to direct not only our lives but oftentimes the lives of others) may continue to be part of the evolution of the Source, yet measured by the significance of what we accomplished with our lives. i.e. the significance of Darwin’s and Einstein’s contribution to human knowledge, are manifest forces that continue to shape our evolution. This is Self-transcendence, the reaching out beyond the boundaries of one’s own existence. *

The need to transcend, to continue to be a part of Life, is innate in us. We are impregnated in varying degrees with an urge to leave a mark in the world – a monumental action or idea, our progeny – that may live beyond our existence. This need is what gives us the power to transform our world.

We are like a stream of water through which Life flows and expands. And like the flow of a stream, we are made out of ever-changing forms … eddies, curlicues … that ebb and unfold into forces that can be great or small, simple or complex, violent or tender, creative or destructive … forces that have the potential to affect and transform the course of Evolution.

But knowledge of our transcendental power threatens established religious and socio-economic dogmas, and it is inhibited through the indoctrination and re-enforcement of absurdities like:

1. We may transcend into a bizarre afterlife, if we unquestioningly follow a male-dominated worldview.
2. We may be granted freedom and happiness, if we blindly abide by an economic doctrine based on unsustainable growth and unbounded consumerism.

What is it going to take for us to see the obvious evidence that Organized Religion and the glorification of Greed are the cause of Divisiveness, Hate, Destruction?

What is it going to take for us to understand that most religious, political and economic leaders do not give a damn about our plight and that they care only about their wealth and the hegemony of their destructive doctrines?

What is it going to take for us to overcome the dominance of a paradigm that sees human beings as disposable and gullible commodities, so we can create instead a paradigm that sees us as decidedly under the pangs of Evolution, yet clearly endowed … each one of us … with the capacity to shape the Future?

What is it going to take?

*Erich Jantsch

Revised July 2018

Note: New posts are usually published on the 1^st and 15^th of the month. To subscribe to the Blog, click on the RSS feeder (orange icon) on the left column of the Home page, down below the Archives.