Paradigm Shift in Progress
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Limitless Ocean
There comes a season in life that requires more than the tame answers that once worked but no longer seem relevant. Life becomes wild and chaotic, and the tame answers stop working. It doesn’t matter how you try to defend them or rehearse how well this way of looking at your life has worked in the past. It’s as if a volcano has erupted, burying all you have spent your life building, as Mt. Vesuvius buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 A.D. The familiar landscape of your life has been changed forever. There is no going back to who you were and where you were, because that person and that place and that time no longer exists.
It may be a cataclysmic event that changes your life: a death of someone near and dear, a loss of job or dream or project, a divorce, a catastrophe, or a sudden earthquake of emotion that opens your eyes to the instability of others—and yourself. Or it could be a more gradual change: the numbing disillusionment of delays, detours and pretty promises made but never kept; the growing belief that the people you once thought were so wise are not so wonderful after all; or learning that someone’s pious talk of caring and comfort was all a smoke screen for a user to abuse you emotionally, physically, or spiritually. It can be when you come face to face with your own human folly and realize that you were living in your head instead of following your heart and now you’re at a dead end with no way out. Whatever the catalyst, things have changed and the old comfortable ways no longer feel good, your old solutions do not work, and you’ve come face to face with your own inadequacies and unanswerable questions.
It’s time for a paradigm shift. Pastor and author Eugene Peterson says in Under the Unpredictable Plant, “A paradigm is a model or pattern for grasping and interpreting reality. If the paradigm is wrong or deficient in some way, reality is understood wrongly or deficiently. It makes no difference that the pieces of reality that are fed into the paradigm are true and understood accurately; if the paradigm arranges them wrongly, they come out wrong.” When the paradigm stops working because conditions have changed, new information has arrived, or old ideas stop making sense, it’s time to set the old belief system aside and be open to a new belief system.
How do you do this? One key is the imagination. As long as you try to drum dry facts and cold figures into your head, you starve your heart and keep yourself stuck. Instead, planting the wild mustard seed of imagination may help you see everything from a fresh perspective. The wild thoughts that seem so fearsome and intimidating at first can become the safest way to navigate this deep life change process.
Let go of familiar categories of “right” and “wrong” and all of the old explanations. Instead of repeating the old story over and over, look for a new story—a more positive and proactive narrative of your life’s tale. This is not easy, because so many voices, especially those inside your head, tell you this is not “safe” or “prudent,” that only a crazy or depraved person be willing to take risks and let go of the truisms of the herd to find their own way in the world. John Middleton Murray says, “For the good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a straight and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.”
An interior shift of the imagination can move you beyond carefully defined boundaries. It’s not so much that you’ll remake the world in another image, but that you’ll learn to see the world differently. When you acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers, you allow new ideas to work their way into your imagination, expanding your reality past your current understanding. With a paradigm shift, everything changes. With a shift of imagination, your way of looking at everything changes.
Quotes:
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Max Planck (physicist, discovered quanta in 1899)
Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized:
• In the first, it is ridiculed.
• In the second, it is opposed.
• In the third, it is regarded as self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
Now we have been dealing with the magical approach, and let me gently remind you that I said that you must be willing to change all the way from the old system of orientation to the new, if you want the new approach to work fully for you in your life.
Jane Roberts, The Magical Approach
Whether we are young or old, whether our dreams are public or private, we are always evolving toward either a smaller and more fearful self, or a larger and more loving self.
Marianne Williamson
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein
It is from that place of intense aliveness, spacious presence, that you can appreciate the aliveness in all things. It is more than just the sense perception of the chair or the perception of the table or the glass of water. Within the sense perceptions you can sense that there is more than what you are perceiving on the surface; that everything has a presence, an alive presence to it. When you touch that within you, then you don't have to wait for something to happen in your life to feel more alive.
Eckhart Tolle
I soon learned that I could have right thought only as I lived my interior life in the very atmosphere of the Abiding Presence.
Albert C. Grier
It is only by allowing your emotions to be highly attuned that you will be able to see things differently. As Pir-O-Mirshid indicates, you become aware of the way identifying with your physical condition entraps you in a very limited purview. Raise yourself from this earthly condition, considering it as scaffolding, as underpinning. This is where God-consciousness will make a difference. If you are trying to reach upward, you are limiting yourself as the one who is wishing it. It is much more effective to think the other way around: The divine perfection is trying to come through my imperfection. There is a divine fulfillment taking place as long as I do not obstruct it or limit it by my personal way of looking at things.
Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
There is something in the universe which forever gives itself to its creation, forever offers itself, not as sacrifice, but as an impartation of its essence in everything. The practitioner must sense this Divine Givingness, this Divine Love, as the manifestation of Spirit through everything. He must sense the harmony of the Divine Life, which, should we permit It, could give such power to our thought that it would become irresistible as law, not through will or concentration, but by attention and willingness.
Ernest Holmes
The practitioner must have a calm which transcends any confusion he wishes to change. He must have a sense of justice that outweighs any manifestation of injustice. And he must have a sense of the immediate availability of good—not as though he were reaching out toward it, but rather, as though he were reaching out with it.
Ernest Holmes
God, in all that is most living and incarnate in him, is not far away from us, altogether apart from the world we see, touch, hear, smell, and taste about us. Rather he awaits us every instant in our action, in the work of the moment. There is a sense in which he is at the tip of my pen, my spade, my brush, my needle—of my heart and of my thought.
Teilhard de Chardin
The brain can as easily speak a good word to the body as to speak an evil one, and the effect will follow. But men do not know this and so they are at the mercy of thousands of idle thoughts, generated by brains so low in the scale of development as to scarcely be capable of thought at all. It is this class of low irresponsible thoughts that forms the mental atmosphere we breathe and keeps us weak in our own opinions until we learn how to combat and drive it away, and how to place our new thoughts, now being educated in strength, in place of them.
Helen Wilman (The Conquest of Poverty ©1899)
What is needed is to learn afresh, to observe, and to discover for ourselves, the meaning of wholeness.
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order
The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.
C.G. Jung
Asked for advice, Ernest Holmes would often say, "I do not know what you should do, but there is Something that does know." Then he would pray affirmatively that the person was now receiving guidance from his or her own inner wisdom.
Affirmative Prayer/Inspiring Person
I’m using this affirmation in 2011:
I am in touch with Spirit every moment. I am guided to create the life of my dreams in an easy and relaxed manner, a healthy and positive way, with grace, ease, and lightness.
Marc Allen
(founder of New World Library, who used this affirmation to get out of financial trouble and build his successful publishing company).
Here's a link to an interview with him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrelvpaxoOM
