The title of this blogsite boldly proclaims not only the concept of a paradigm shift in the past tense, but a plurality of paradigms! Either aspect of such a proclamation is open to challenge, not to mention my usage of the word ‘paradigm’. Quite frankly I’m comfortable side-stepping the endless debate over the word that Thomas Kuhn brought into modern scholarly discourse in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. My use of the term should reveal my understanding. Paradigm is a word with an expansive reach and several nuances; the underlying concept should not be trivialized lest its world-changing implications be lost. As for using the past tense of shift, and the plural of paradigm, I am not only happy, but eager to elaborate.
World view awakening to interconnectedness
My largest, most comprehensive and inclusive answer to the two-part challenge just postulated might easily be “Yes about the shift, but no about the plurality.” There is certainly a huge shift in progress; while some might say it is barely underway, its effects are showing up all around us: think internet, then Arab spring, then Occupy. I could argue that it is about just one paradigm, namely the over-arching world view – or common set of assumptions about the nature of reality – shared by most of the literate world and its mainstream institutions. Let me describe it further in terms of the shift I see gaining momentum.
Our collective world view is changing from one that sees a world full of separate, fundamentally disconnected entities struggling against nature and each other to survive and prevail (over others less fortunate), into one that sees the planet and all its lifeforms as an interconnected whole, trying to wake up and discover its true nature through each of us, particularly we humans, its noisiest and often most disruptive component parts. Where each of us stands in the spectrum that spreads between between these two extremes of viewpoint profoundly influences our actions and thus every aspect of life on the planet affected by human activity.
But that high level perspective overlooks fundamental subdivisions, components whose recognition is essential to the discussions I hope to provoke.
How do we decide what is true?
The approach of this blog will be to break down this most comprehensive of paradigms into at least several constituent ‘scripts’, each of which could legitimately qualify for paradigm status on its own. A classic example, perhaps the backbone of most other scripts we might identify, is the set of rules or guidelines we as individuals – and thus as a culture – apply to decide what is true. In everyday activities this question often stands almost invisibly behind the more commonly asked question “What is best to do next?”
Just a year ago I might have been comfortable with, albeit conflicted about, making the claim that ‘mainstream’ truth-seeking remains shackled to the rules of logic applied largely to physical evidence, or, at the least, hard-nosed facts. This is the paradigm derived largely from the rules set forth by the scientific and industrial revolutions that closed out the previous millenium: If you can deduce it logically from indisputable evidence, it must be true (and/or the right course to take). If not, it’s just fluff, conjecture, the stuff fantasies are made of.
On rare occasions each of us may actually choose to go through the entirety of this truth-testing process individually. Some may even have a better test – like the one I’m about to share, or another one that works best for them. Yet there is so much more we accept second hand, relying on our belief, assumption, or just plain hope, that others have applied a set of truth filters that are equally as rigorous as our own. Inasmuch as we let ourselves sleep-walk through segments of our lives on auto-pilot, we find ourselves steered according to ‘truths’ that may have little or no basis other than the fact that some other group, government, or corporation[s] saw it as advantageous for their own agendas to have us think that way.
Looking within, beyond the words
I am relieved to be joining, after resisting for so long, an ancient school of thought whose emergence into the mainstream is not only part of, but fundamental to, the global awakening now in progress. In some ways it is nothing more than an open and shared acknowledgement of something we’ve always known deep inside but have been suppressed from sharing. It is simply the realization that recognition of truth can come from within … that there is an inner knowing that is not only universally valid, but reflects the essence of who we are, namely an inseparable part of a universal whole that is all of consciousness.
The popularization of this concept in recent years is often expressed as “thinking with your heart”. When we quiet the chatter in our heads, we can literally allow the heart area of our bodies to feel for an answer to a problem, an understanding of a situation, or a means of relating with someone with whom we have eye contact in between the words. The thoughts may well continue to run rampant in our heads, but something more visceral than that tells us, without hesitation, which of those thoughts ‘rings true’.
While some will argue that the heart organ itself plays a critical role in this phenomenon, I am referring to a broader phenomenon that others, including me, may sometimes attribute to their ‘gut’. I was amazed and thrilled to hear on NPR two years ago a parallel philosophy described in a story about my late great uncle, a popular Williams College professor, by one of his former students. After describing all the factors he took into consideration before assigning a grade, he finished with: “Then I consult my stomach.”
Unity consciousness making it all work
It may be glaringly obvious that I’m trying to steer around questions about concepts of God and the guidelines of specific religious groups about guidance from something larger than logic. (In fact my uncle Fred was said to be notoriously agnostic.) Nevertheless, I have a vision of reality many would call spiritual. I believe in the Vedantic concept a single all-encompassing consciousness that underlies all there is. Thie concept was shared by a founding father of quantum physics, Erwin Schrodinger (in a 1943 lecture series entitled “What Is Life”), in which he also notes that this consciousness must be responsible for the laws of nature. Many thinkers these days refer to this single, unity consciousness simply as “Source”. That works for me.
Schrodinger, like the eastern mystics who influenced him and others in his field, argued that as conscious beings we are not separate at all, but a tiny part of that unitary consciousness that is the universe – both its creator and its witness. He is also the man who gave us the wave equation that allows physicists to describe possible realities (actually vibration probabilities) in terms of their component frequencies. When we talk about the world in terms of vibrating energy, it is the component frequencies that determine the vibrational content of an energy system.
‘Vibes’, math, and feelings
And it turns out that mathematics helps describe and explain how some combinations of frequencies fit together much better than others. Aesthetically, music depends upon similar principles, which, when applied creatively as melodies and chord progressions, speak to us in feeling, not in words, giving us a wonderful metaphor for how we “tune into” many other phenomena non-verbally.
Little room for heart in institutional thinking
Fully enabling any “feeling” approach to truth is a tough challenge for our more public personnae. Our institutions are hardly ready to find an official place for “inner knowing”; this issue is, perhaps as it should be, hopelessly entwined with that of legitimizing any “voice of God”.
Yet where institutional decisions boil down to ‘letter of the law’ and the words formed by those letters lack insight and/or compassion, reliance upon hard, cold logic seems equally misguided. The wisest choices we might make often involve valid sources of truth that are systematically and systemically outlawed by a formalism to which we seem hopelessly and blindly committed – our ‘rules of engagement’, be they legal, economic, and sometimes even ethical.
A particularly discouraging aspect of our legal system and its role as the backbone for decisions made by both governments and corporations is its fundamental adversarial nature, and the wisdom that can be lost in that commitment. We are encouraged to identify with the good guy, and see bad guys as not like us … often something less than human. What have we let happen to our collective heart when we participate in that kind of thinking?
paradigms shifted 
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