The Failure to Persuade

My attempts to persuade a small number of my fellow human beings have not for the most part been successful. Persuade them to what? Convince them that living in P-B is not the only choice available and most certainly not the best choice. The “persuader’s” life can be a frustrating one. I remember Harriet Tubman’s remark concerning her efforts to convince slaves to join her for a trip on the nighttime “”underground railroad” to freedom. After freeing herself, she led over 1,000 other slaves to freedom in the north. “I could have saved more if they had only believed me.” It was hard for some slaves living in their version of P-B to gaze up at the Big Dipper (the drinking gourd) and risk a shift from a well-known, if horrible, story to one that must have seemed attractive but frightening. Not only individuals, but entire cultures can become so convinced of the inevitability of the formed patterns that they view them as absolute.  This reminder by Han F. DeWit that “group-think,” which totalitarian governments have depended on throughout human history, is also alive and well in our American democracy.

So, like Tubman, I am sure that many people who hear my enthusiastic pitch for emancipation also find it hard to believe. A new life characterized by freedom from suffering among other substantial benefits, that is to say, life in P-A, is indeed difficult if not impossible to imagine.

What if I am disingenuous, a charlatan, a nut-case, naive? If I am lying for reasons that are not apparent, then certainly no one would want to invest time and energy in something as daunting as a paradigm shift. Or if something doesn’t seem quite right about me it might not be that I am lying but that I am not entirely sane. Certainly, some of my descriptions can seem a bit farfetched. After all, P-A is radically different from P-B.

On the other hand, I may not be missing a few marbles, I may only be guileless. I can sound like Pollyanna spouting a “too good to be true” story about a “Shangri-La” that can be reached by a disarmingly simple process. A paradigm shift doesn’t require any of the talents, connections, or extraordinary efforts that success in P-B often requires, so naturally the whole spiel can smell a bit fishy.

If living in the present moment is seen as possible by only the superhuman, the avatars, then that poses a formidable barrier for the person who sees themselves as ordinary. I must then attempt to refute each of these arguments or misunderstandings if I am to achieve success in convincing others of the paradigm shift’s desirability and attainability.

First of all, the paradigm shift is not my idea. P-A is a narrative long advocated by the mystics in all of the world’s major religions and sages of every historical age and every region of the world. The mythology (articulated by C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell) so common among the peoples of the world, also contains the principles that form the foundation of the P-A worldview. A high percentage of people have experienced P-A in so-called “peak experiences” that can be intuitively understood to be a shift to an alternative experience of reality. In short, living in the Now is nothing new and I am in good company offering it as a solution to humanity’s unsustainable future.

The final “acid test” of whether P-A and a new identity is possible for each one of us is simply to try the Point of Power Practice and listen to our own “still small voice,”  our own intuitive wisdom to reveal whether it works or not. The paradigm shift requires that we become self-reliant, that we come to trust our own power and ability to distinguish truth from illusion. Too many of us have become accustomed to a victim identity that leaves us feeling powerless when confronted by our own dysfunctional behavior. We have listened to the voice of our false self and our survival strategy conditioning, and mistake despair and illusion for reality. Subordinate your head to your heart and let your true self lead you out of the wilderness. You have been a slave long enough.

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References and notes are available for this article.
For a much more in-depth discussion on Simple Reality, read Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival, by Roy Charles Henry, published in 2011.