The importance of a paradigm shift is illustrated in a newspaper account of a recipient of the Lasker award, “the nation’s most prestigious medical prize.” Psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck, 85, of the University of Pennsylvania was awarded one of the $100,000 prizes for his development of cognitive therapy in the 1960’s. “Beck and his students showed that cognitive therapy can reverse serious mental illnesses in weekly sessions over two or three months.”
Here is a basic description of cognitive therapy. “The therapy is a counseling technique in which patients learn to head off or defuse self-defeating thoughts before acting on them.”
Beck, being in the context of P-B, would not have realized that he had discovered the basic practice of self-realization—what we call The Point of Power Practice.
Whether we are dealing with mental illness or not, we are all presented with the challenge of choosing to react or respond many times each day. A reaction is when we act on an afflictive, self-destructive emotion or thought. A response is when we stay present until the emotion is “defused,” in Beck’s description.
When we stay in the present moment, we do not feed our self-destructive conditioning and are empowered to act with awareness and compassion. In short, we stay present to Simple Reality and escape the unsustainable illusion of P-B.
In the context of P-A, we can recognize the description of “life as a meditation” or the basic practice of staying present moment by moment. This not only leads to good mental health but to an experience of the Now which is the highest human attainment possible, the apex of human self expression.
* References available.
