Paradigm A: The End of Illusion

It is helpful to make the distinctions between P-B and P-A in detail. The following partial list is meant to help us begin to get the feel of the profound difference between these two worldviews.

Following are some of the feelings or emotions, beliefs, attitudes and values
in P-B and P-A:

In addition to clarifying the differences between the two paradigms, we can also begin to entertain the possibility of a collective shift between paradigms, of moving humanity from one to the other. Donella Meadows in the following description emphasizes the importance of continuing to contrast the two paradigms, emphasizing the advantages of P-A over P-B.  How to Change Paradigms: “You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures of the old paradigm, you keep speaking louder and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”   The most effective and realistic paradigm shift, however, will involve one person at a time until a so-called “critical mass” is reached.

Psychology supports the importance of the worldview in achieving behavioral change. Daniel Brown confirms that: “Social psychologists have shown that alterations in one’s outcome, expectations and belief system [worldview] have a significant impact on all types of behavioral change.”

In the context of Christianity we have Jung describing the implicate order expressing through each person. “The future indwelling of the Holy Ghost [implicate order] in man amounts to a continuing incarnation of God. Christ, as the begotten son of God and pre-existing mediator, is a first-born and a divine paradigm which will be followed by further incarnations of the Holy Ghost in the empirical man.”

The mystic, Thomas Troward, expresses P-A in still another way. “The spiritual kingdom is within us, and as we realize it there so it becomes to us a reality. It is the unvarying law of the subjective life that ‘as a man thinketh in his heart so is he,’ that is to say, his inward subjective states are the only true reality, and what we call external realities are only their objective correspondences.”   The inescapable conclusion then is that the world of form has no substantial reality or meaning beyond that which we give it.

Mystics can be found in the most unlikely places but, of course, we are all mystics at heart. The following content relating to P-A was revealed by the mind of an academic, an intellectual and a professor of history – a very unlikely mystic. Joseph Campbell describes the insights of Professor Toynbee. As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new…. Professor Toynbee uses the terms ‘detachment’ and ‘transfiguration’ to describe the crisis by which the higher spiritual dimension is attained that makes possible the resumption of the work of creation. The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external [P-B] to the internal world [P-A] …a retreat from the desperations of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within.

One of the most profound and deeply felt sources of the P-A experience is poetry. A poet often expresses profound feelings in the context of P-A. The best poets usher us into the realm of Simple Reality. Kahlil Gibran is such a poet.

Art
And if there come the singers and the dancers and the flute players,
buy of their gifts also.
For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense,
and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams,
is rainment and food for your soul.

Children
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
for they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. 

Bernie Siegel reminds us of the importance of the relationship between our hearts and the narrative in which it is contained:

Our heart has something to say and we can do two things. Give it a nurturing story in which to say it and then speak. Your health and the future of humanity depend on it.

We are very ambitious, we humans, but our ambition is focused on childish things. We do not aspire to serious pursuits; we find it difficult to put aside our fears and consider what is really happening around us. To do so will require that we transcend self-delusion, to admit that we have been clinging to beliefs that, when closely examined, do not make sense. How long have we been fleeing Simple Reality, how long have we persisted in our self-destructive behaviors and how long have we known that we have been doing this? For a very long time!

We close this chapter with one last look at the revelations left to us by the Eastern mystics found in the Hindu/Buddhist scriptures. Among the most toxic human beliefs driving many of our most self-destructive behaviors has to do with the illusion that we exist as separate individuals, as separate selves or egos. The American philosopher Emerson, after studying the Upanishads would give perfect expression to the Hindu conviction that individuality is a delusion.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahman sings.
        From Brahma by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Historian Will Durant has a talent for paraphrasing the Upanishads. “The (non-individual) soul or force within us is identical with the impersonal Soul of the World.”   The insight that Atman, the individual soul, and Brahman are one will be repeated by Jesus as ‘The Father and I are one.’ “The Upanishads burn this doctrine into the pupil’s mind with untiring … repetition.” 

To lay aside the false self so addicted to the pursuit of pleasure, power and material possessions, and which lies at the heart of P-B, will require a story and a strategy little known in the West. The Judeo-Christian half of the globe whose religion is as permeated with individualism as are his political and economic institutions” contrasts markedly with the “mystic and impersonal immortality—dominating Hindu thought from Buddha to Gandhi, from Yajnavalkya to Tagore.

Perhaps we should further qualify the source of our “ultimate truths” if we are going to dance with the mystics to the music of the ancient sacred insights. We will let Will Durant, and the brilliant philosopher Schopenhauer give testimony. “In the whole world,” said Schopenhauer, “there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life—it will be the solace of my death.”  Here…are the oldest extant philosophy and psychology of our race; the surprisingly subtle and patient effort of man to understand the mind and the world, and their relation. The Upanishads are as old as Homer, and as modern as Kant.

What is the strategy by which we can lay aside the craving and aversion of the false self and enter into Nirvana in which there is no individual consciousness? We must first consider the ultimate nature of our context: Where are we? Are we in a paradigm of many discrete parts, people separate from other people, people separate from nature, communities separate from other communities? Maybe a truer story is just the opposite. Maybe the narrative is characterized by the “good news” of Oneness in which all of the creation that we see around us is bound together, interrelated and mutually supportive when profoundly understood. Maybe what our deeper innate wisdom will tell us when we take time to listen is that we actually live immersed in the embrace of a natural, harmonious and peaceful narrative where we don’t have to live in anxiety or compete with and destroy our neighbors and our environment.

When we see ourselves as parts of a whole, when we reform ourselves and our desires in terms of the whole, then our personal disappointments and defeats, our varied suffering and inevitable death, no longer sadden us as bitterly as before; they are lost in the amplitude of infinity.

We have looked at our first two “ultimate” realities, namely, no separate, isolated “me” and Oneness, rather than a “shattered” and threatening environment paralyzing us with fear. Next, we turn to the Buddha and the First Noble Truth. In the Buddha we have the researcher who is without peer among the great teacher/mystics, using himself as his own lab rat. He sat in deep meditation and ran the maze of his own mind that revealed the most fundamental patterns of the human agony that most of us deny exists, even today 2,500 years later.

What we are loath to admit is that much of our survival strategy, which we use to distract ourselves from our existential suffering, is delusional. Our desperate seeking of power and control does not make us feel safer, our frantic accumulation of “stuff” does not deliver security, and the grasping of pleasures galore leaves us feeling that we are at the end of our rope. And indeed, we are at the end of the rope, choking for air. The very life-giving air that we seek is contained in our own breath which will lead us “within” and restore the ancient connection to the guidance system that will gently lead us out of our current dilemma. We know where we should go and how to get there, that knowledge is intuitive. The Buddha was not “special.” He was in every respect just like you and me.

We must sever the illusory connection that we have to the body and its sensations, the machinations of the mind and our over-reactive afflictive emotions. Nothing so short-lived, nothing so ephemeral, should be taken as the substance of Simple Reality. The world of form, the sensations that exist “out there” reveal nothing about the world of Reality except what it is not. When we realize our human tendency to identify with our mind, body and emotions, we have discovered the origin of our dissatisfaction with life; we have revealed the causes of our personal suffering and the energy being used to create the unsustainable human condition.

Next, we humans pride ourselves on our capacity for reason. Durant continues his process of extracting the essence of the Upanishad’s wisdom. The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain that aches at a little calculus ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment? Not that the intellect is useless; it has its modest place, and serves us well when it deals with relations and things [P-B]; but how it falters before the eternal, the infinite, or the elementally real! In the presence of that silent reality which supports all appearances, and wells up in all consciousness, we need some other organ of perception and understanding than these senses and this reason.  What is this other organ of perception? The highest understanding, as Spinoza was to say, is direct perception, immediate insight; it is, as Bergson would say, intuition, the inward seeing of the mind that has deliberately closed as far as it can the portals of external sense.

The intellect in P-B is severely limited by the context of the story and engages in what Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles would call “premature cognitive commitments.” Eccles is a neuro-physiologist who studies the mechanics of perception. He contends that, “…there are no colors in the real world, or smells, textures, or scents; they are structured in our awareness. Such perceptions are leading to the overthrow of the ‘superstition of materialism’ that the world is made up of matter and contains objects that are separated from each other in space and time. Everything is ultimately made up of atoms made up of particles moving at lightning speed around empty spaces. These particles are not material objects, but fluctuations in a field of energy. The cells communicate with each other through the language of neuropeptides, which are the biochemical equivalent of thought, he explains.”

It is in the process of meditation and becoming the observer of the illusion of the false self that we attain the insight of Oneness and experience the “feeling” of our connection with Simple Reality. Using the Point of Power Practice to enable us to choose response instead of reaction ushers us through the doorway into P-A. When we abandon the story dominated by the “head” and enter the narrative nurtured by the “heart” then we will find our way out of the maze that currently entraps us. Then we will experience the exhilaration of liberation, we will be free at last.

We were born with a longing for the joy, happiness, simplicity, peace, and compassion of P-A.  But the immediate need to create a survival strategy takes precedence and we soon forget our true nature.  Returning to P-A is possible by giving a profound response to each of the three great questions:

Where Am I?

First we must remember where we are, and that question is answered in a single word “Oneness.”  We are contained in a paradigm where all of Creation is inter-dependent and inter-related, and therefore we are that Creation.

Who Am I?

We derive our identity from the answer to the first question.  We are not separate from nature or each other, nor are we fragmented within ourselves with a separate ego, shadow, personal unconscious, or collective unconscious.  We are an expression of pure, indestructible energy expressing beyond the illusion of time and space.  Just as Creation is perfect and whole, so are we perfect and whole.

Why Am I Here?

We are here to experience reality.  To do this and to avoid the pitfalls of the illusions of P-B, we must have an effective practice that keeps us in the present moment.  In other words, the practice must empower us to respond to life rather than to react.  Our conditioned, habitual reactions take us out of the present moment.  The Point of Power Practice enables us to choose response over reaction, thereby experiencing the Simple Reality that is P-A.