Paradigms Shifting

I think that the greatest paradigm shift in our time is our growing understanding of what paradigms are, how we get them, how they affect our perceptions, our worldviews, how we co-create them, and how we can use them in creating a world that works for all.

They are the hidden persuaders, invisible contexts that convey meaning and filter our interpretive perceptions of all the going-on-ness we call reality. Changing a filtering paradigm context changes everything.

Our world needs a large, 360-degree, wide-angle (‘Weltanschauung’) contextual, apertural-lens, displaying the greatest holistic capacity possible, sourcing strategies and actions from within, from a space of deep wisdom and spiritual impulse of Love (i.e., with our essential being and stand-in-the-world as source for co-creative action), midwifing emerging integral paradigms for empowering personal, social, systemic, and planetary change, transformation and wellbeing. (Whew, what a mouthful!)

“The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level at which we have created them… We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive.” – Albert Einstein

With a world in personal and planetary critical transition and crisis, we need to focus not merely on surface symptoms of dysfunction but on deeper-rooted fundamental factors such as our individual and shared mental models—our worldviews, our paradigms.

Meta-theory perspectives can have an enlightening, awakening and even the thrilling sense effect of reorganizing everything. Ever have such an experience? Paradigms or mental models constitute our internal structure of beliefs, concepts, and operating assumptions, our maps of reality, our worldviews. Paradigmatic perspectives influence and shape most everything.

Analogically speaking, paradigms function like central operating systems in a computer (and consciousness). They function as a sort of supra-process, transforming undefined perceptions into what we call our experience. Paradigms enable us to make sense of our lives and everything in it. Everything we think, perceive, feel, and do is paradigm-connected (often invisibly so).

Paradigms guide actions. They constitute our core context that gives or creates meaning and the ground for transformation, including our self-identity. If we aimed at being like Mahatma Ghandi or Mother Teresa and ended up being like Hitler or an Isis terrorist, it would certainly be time to check our concepts, beliefs, practices, values, and operating assumptions (often hidden underneath the water-line of awareness in our paradigms).

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t get in.” – Isaac Asimov

I think the most potentially positive and generative paradigm in our time lies within Ken Wilber’s comprehensive, integral framework or meta-theory. It enhances personal awareness that is a critical element in any approach to transformation. It fosters individual and collective awareness and deep wisdom expressed in action. It values actions that take into account and move in a direction from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to worldcentric, to Kosmocentric.

Wilber’s comprehensive integral map of perspectives or ‘integral operating system’ (IOS), when practiced, can help bring clarity to dialogue, collaboration, and cooperation among disparate disciplines and conflicting individuals with different (valuable but partial) perspectives and mindsets, and with groups, organizations, regional, state, national and international entities. It’s like a universal lens.

Wilber embraces a coherent, comprehensive, multidisciplinary, synthesizing, visionary yet scholarly, integrative worldview. It is centered in the Whole as source, context, and goal of evolution. He unwraps the concept of Holarchy in which the fundamental category is the holon, suggesting that every entity and phenomenon in the universe is simultaneously both a whole and a part (neither merely a whole nor a part). ‘Depth’ involves the number of levels in a holon, and ‘span’ is the number of holons on a level. A general orienting generalization proposes that ethical action seeks to “protect and promote the greatest depth for the greatest span.” Scientific evidence suggests there is a self-organizing, ‘include and transcend’ evolutionary process in physical, biological, and noetic spheres—in matter, life, mind, and spirit. As each new stage or level of life develops (unfolds), it includes (enfolds) its predecessor. Everything is moving in a direction of greater complexity, consciousness. and wholeness. Such ‘holomovement’ is the universe’s life code, our cosmic DNA, wholeness in our bones.

If not familiar with Ken Wilber’s comprehensive integral map of self and world, I suggest first checking out his AQAL framework or integral map of perspectives (IOS, integral operating system). Taking into account all quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types help make sense of everything. A good place to begin would be his little paperback book “The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything.”

Maps are important and useful. Traveling with an incomplete map could get you lost. But remember any map is merely a map, not the territory, as similarly a menu is not the food—yet both are useful guides.

What’s your paradigm? Can you ‘par-a-digm?’