A paradigm is a set of elemental assumptions, values,
beliefs and practices held in common by a community or professional discipline.
Paradigm is another way of saying consensus reality – what everybody in
a shared milieu agrees is and is not real. Such agreements can vary
greatly from place to place and time to time, depending on memetic factors
like whether we live amongst Moslems, Christians or Secular Humanists,
or find ourselves governed by socialists, fascists, technocrats or theocrats,
etc. On the scale of global events, wildly differing cultural paradigms
held in different parts of the world account for most international and
intercultural conflict. What one culture labels “good,” another labels
“evil.” Since each is convinced their own cultural consen-sus describes
the only “real reality,” they assume the other side, to disagree, must
be either crazy or wicked. Where avoidance is not possible, war seems
justified, genocide necessary, violent conquest reasonably rede-fined as
liberation. One culture’s patriot becomes another’s insurgent, one
religion’s saint another’s infidel.
The unique “box” each of us dreams in, as described in
the opening chapter of this book, is our personal paradigm, a distinctive
consensus concerning what reality is, how it functions, who’s in charge,
and what is and is not possible, for ourselves and for others, that has
been reached, not by an outer community of people, but rather, amongst
the singular collection of memes and memeplex-es housed in each of our
individual brains. The fact that no two people can ever share identical
life experiences, encounter exactly the same influences, or absorb them
in precisely the same way assures that the exact mix of memes inside each
of our heads will always be as irreproducible as a snowflake, the only
one of its kind anywhere, in any time, which is what makes the illusion
of individual personality, of a consistent and persistent “I,” so convincing.
Like the frame around a picture, the covers of a novel, or the screen on
which a movie is projected in the darkness, our personal paradigm provides
a unique, all-encompassing, and most often wholly unconscious context in
which we experience the events of our daily lives, an enveloping “center-of-my-own-small-world”
backdrop against which the disparate thoughts, feelings, labors, chance
meetings, random perceptions etc. we encounter each day are shaped into
a cohesive narrative – an apparently-meaningful, cradle-to-grave
story in which we are the main character.
All stories have beginnings, middles and endings.
Stories are, by nature, teleological in that we generally understand those
beginnings and middles to be moving purposefully toward predestined ends.
When we read a novel or watch a movie, we trust the author or director
not to distract us with irrelevant action or dialogue. We expect
every aspect of the storytelling process to serve the final climax and
summation. The details of that ending may remain a mystery right
up until the closing frames or pages, but we trust along the way that,
when the veil is finally lifted, we won't be left scratching our heads,
thinking, "Hmmm… Didn't see that coming…" Our satisfaction
depends on being able to recognize, at story's-end, how every element encountered
along the way contributed meaningfully to the plot's ultimate resolution,
and even made it inevitable. All the loose ends are tied up.
In the teleology of storytelling, the insight, moral lesson, emotional
transformation, etc. with which the story concludes becomes the reason
for telling the tale in the first place. All beginnings lead
purposefully toward inexorable ends, futures that draw the past and present
toward them like invisible magnets in the distance.
Our real lives, in contrast, are filled to overflowing
with irrelevant action and dialogue. Amongst the actual daily events
we move between, or, more often, juggle simultaneously as we attend to
life's demands, there are no clear plotlines, no sharply-demarcated parallel
streams of experience like TV channels running separate programs that never
touch or intertwine, and between which we are free to move with the simple
tap of a remote button. In real life, things happen all at
once, we respond, and in retrospect, we invent stories that enable us to
artificially separate, sort, remember and share our perceptions and experiences
in a meaningful way – which sounds like a great and useful ability until
we remember that all such sorting and assignment of meaning falls within
the purview of memes.
Any apparent teleology perceived in the lives of Stage
One and Two sleepers is exactly that – only-apparent, and never real.
Until we awaken, our lives have no conscious author or director capable
of crafting and intentionally manifesting a genuine "life story."
We settle, instead, for a kind of ersatz, meme-driven, teleological reverse-engineering
in which chance endings determine where, in retrospect, we perceive the
story to have begun, as when an account of events that end in divorce,
for one person, begins with the wedding, while for another the story may
begin with a previous divorce and lessons not learned, while a third storyteller
starts with childhood and witnessing his or her own parents’ messy breakup,
etc. None of the three versions of the story is true in any objective
sense. Each day, events occur that impact our ability to tolerate
marriage to our spouse, but in between such events, and even in the moment
they are happening, we go to work, raise our children, talk with friends,
cook, eat, garden, read and write books, etc… These things all happen
together; they are intimately entangled in the present moment of the “now”
in which they occur. It is only later that we separate selected strands
out of life’s skein and weave from them a story, a highly-selective, and
most often self-serving “slice of life” we repeat to ourselves and to others
until it becomes an unshakeable pillar of our personal paradigm destined
to shape our experience and interpretation of future events. Most
of our interpersonal conflicts stem from the clash of alternate, contradictory
“storylines” woven from roughly the same events. For me, it happened
this way. Your version of the story is different. You must
be either crazy or wicked.
In the process of reverse-engineering the story of our
lives, we most often take (or mis-take, as the case may be) the lesson
learned, the moral, the final life or mind changing impact of a given chain
of events to be the reason the experience occurred in the first place –
because we needed to learn X, Y and Z, we tell ourselves in hindsight,
A, B and C had to happen just as they did… Over the course of a lifetime,
innumerable such “story strands,” woven together, convince us that our
lives consist of a single braid stretching from our births to our deaths,
each twist and turn along the way guided by the hand of some invisible
intelligence who all along knew the final purpose we were born to serve,
but which is only revealed to us in the eleventh hour, when all our life
achievements, failures, victories and defeats can be seen in full retrospect
and judged subjectively in relation to where all the chips finally landed.
Just as the beginning and middle of each individual story we tell ourselves
along the way appear, looking back, to purposefully serve the end they
reached (because it is only after events have reached their climax that
we look back and select which "threads" we will weave into our narrative,
and which we'll leave out), so too, our lives, reviewed at any point along
the way, appear to be complexly intertwined but ultimately consistent narratives
leading inexorably, even “divinely,” to the very moment in which we choose
to turn our attention to the past.
On the scale of Humanity’s collective dream, we see a
similar teleological factor at work. With mass events like war, pandemic
disease or devastating natural disaster, the meme-inspired stories we tell
ourselves and each other enable such blatant absurdities as both sides
in a battle believing that "God is on our side…," or celebrity clergy-men
proclaiming violent weather to be the wrath of God on sinful cities, while
unnamed thousands in the effected locations thank the very same God for
saving them from the "Devil's Storm…" Where no clear end is yet in
sight – as with the greater "Human Story" of where, as a species, we come
from, where we're going and, by inference, what we ought to be doing with
our lives here in the middle of the story – how we interpret the meaning
of today’s events will depend largely on where we believe the storyline
is destined to eventually lead us, on the imaginary future we choose to
embrace, and from which we will “look back” to decide where we perceive
the story to have begun. These two speculative poles – an imagined
future that breeds a highly selective, and most often, equally-imaginary,
vision of the past – work together to create the contextual pseudo-reality
in which we will choose how to measure our experiences and make choices
in the present moment.
Amongst all the religious, political, racial and cultural
diversity coloring the global human social landscape, every meme and memeplex
inhabiting every human brain on Earth participates in the telling of one
or another of only three such grand, overarching “Human Stories.”
Every person, culture, nation, religion, philosophy, political or economic
system – everything you can think of within the wide panoply of human life,
ideas, beliefs, styles of governance, morality, ethics, literature, science
and history (remember the look-back factor above) fits somewhere within
and serves the “storyline” of one of just three comprehensive, competing
memetic narratives. Like the various versions of the divorce story
above, none are true in any objectively real sense. But because we
believe in them, because we live within them, psychically, much the way
we live physically enveloped by the invisible air, rarely, if ever, even
thinking of them as stories at all, but rather accepting them as unquestioned
and unquestionable face-value facts, these three mega-memes enjoy almost
unchallenged control over how we process and understand our human experience
– especially regarding the question of where the human story will end,
and based on that predicted, though as-yet-unrealized finale, where it
is perceived to have begun, and exactly where/when along the teleological
timeline we perceive ourselves to be standing today.
These three competing, world-controlling mega-memeplexes
are:
The Paradigm of Decline. In this story, Humanity
was born in paradisiacal splendor. The world was pure and perfect
and new. Life was easy and good. Whether by natural or supernatural
causes, the situation changed. The Golden Age ended and life/civilization/society
began a long, gradual slide down a slippery slope of physical, moral, intellect-ual
and/or spiritual decay toward some inevitable future apocalyptic crash.
This is the paradigm of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and of vast swaths
of Western culture, literature, law, government, science, etc. which remain
to this day deeply rooted in this ancient Abrahamic world-view. This
story fuels Hinduism as well, with its progression of Yugas, each more
chaotic, violent and corrupted than the last, culminating in the eventual
destruction of the world, and the “breathing in” of the spent universe
by Brahmin.
We embody this story on a personal scale when we remember
childhood as golden, pure, perfect and innocent, and dread aging as a process
of physical decline leading toward bitter, inevitable decrepitude and death.
Most religions rooted in the Paradigm of Decline sweeten the ending by
predicting renewal following the crash, as in Christianity’s prophesied
“New Heaven and New Earth” or Brahmin’s expected “breathing out again”
of the revitalized universe in Hinduism. On a personal level, we,
too, expect to be renewed after our individual deaths, by way of eternal
life at God’s side in Heaven, reincarnation into a new human body, etc.
But in the present moment, when neither personal nor
planetary apocalypse has yet manifested, when the majority of memes housed
in our brains reflect a Paradigm of Decline orientation, we will interpret
events in light of that dire end's inevitable approach. If we bother
to fight the decline we see in the world around us at all, we do so on
principle only, rather than with the expectation of any long-lived success.
Of course the world is screwed up, we think. We’re fallen creatures
– what else should we expect?
The Paradigm of Stasis. In all times and places
there have always been large numbers of people who think of the future
as little more than an extension, or at best a refinement, of the present,
or who do not think very long or hard about the future at all. Though
they may intellectually acknowledge that, of course, people lived differently
in the past (We burn oil now, instead of wood, and we build skyscrapers
instead of pyramids…), and will almost certainly live differently in the
future (Those computers sure get better every year…), on a daily basis,
they make the majority of their behavioral choices as if they considered
neither proposition to be true or particularly relevant. In the Paradigm
of Stasis worldview, life is considered to have always been enough like
it is today that closer examination is unnecessary, and despite the Chicken
Little bawling of extremists, things are likely to continue just as they
are pretty much forever. This is the paradigm of unbridled Capitalism,
the "American Dream," youth-and-celebrity-obsessed I gotta get mine, Yo!
MTV live-for-the-moment pop culture, Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll, working
for the weekend, etc. The Paradigm of Stasis equally underlies most
economic, political and social Conservatism, as when a remarkable number
of self-professed believers in religious versions of the Paradigm of Decline
actually live their lives centered in the Paradigm of Stasis, proclaiming
their personally-held political opinions, social prejudices, jingoistic
nationalisms and Puritanical moral absolutes to exactly mirror God's own,
and devoting themselves to the task of creating national and global theocracies
capable of imposing those beliefs and standards on everyone , everywhere,
for all time. The only real change they embrace is toward the transformation
of the current Status Quo into a stasis more to their liking – then it's
business as usual forever!
On the personal scale, we live out the Paradigm of Stasis
story whenever we coast through life with no thought of the future, never
saving or investing, making no plans for an old age we'd rather not think
about, or when we become so complacent in our pleasurable lifestyles that
we refuse to acknowledge the impact of our choices on others, and find
ourselves at every turn fighting off awareness of change in the world around
us. The Paradigm of Stasis allows us to acknowledge that world oil
supplies are running out, but to continue our present consumption habits
just as they are, based on the assumption that it's "someone else's problem,"
and somebody, somewhere will surely come up with something soon...
It allows us to eat meat with full knowledge that, by doing so we are poisoning
our bodies and sentencing millions to death. It allows us to support
politicians we know to be corrupt or even dangerous because they pander
to our theocratic social agendas.
Left or Right, rich or poor, religious or secular, whether
moved by the desire for raw physical pleasure or for the imposition of
Puritan moral absolutes, for those whose lives are centered in the Paradigm
of Stasis, the future is secured by the digging of one's heels into the
soil of the present, and the insistence in the face of all evidence to
the contrary that The Good Times, however we personally choose to define
them, once achieved, can – and should! – roll on, unchecked, forever.
The Paradigm of Evolution. Here, simplicity leads
to complexity, and complexity is, by and large, in its own right, good.
In Biology, naturally-existing organic molecules are believed to have come
together to form specialized proteins, which banded together to form cells,
which in turn became plants, animals and people through a multi-billion-years-long
process of natural selection. The scientific theory of evolution
as described by Darwin is not teleological – life is not understood, scientifically,
to be pursuing any specific end. There is continual change as complex
creatures evolve new traits to better exploit changing environmental conditions,
but movement is only in the direction of survival, and not the unfolding
of any divine plan or the pursuit of any predestined goal. Though
in constant motion, life has no destination. There is no future “ideal
state” toward which life is considered to be moving.
Psychologically, socially, culturally, artistically and
spiritually, however, the Darwinian model of evolution has – after significant,
and often unacknowledged revision – been adopted to support a teleology
of positive growth, of progressive personal and collective development,
and of a seedling-like unfolding and flowering of immanent inner potential.
This is the paradigm of self-actualization, Depth Psychology, New Age spirituality,
the motivation/inspiration/self-development industry, as well as ancient
Eastern religions like Buddhism and Taoism. The evolutionary paradigm
underlies New Manage-ment practices in business, such as Continuous Quality
Improvement, which creates informational feedback loops within an organization
designed to generate constant positive change and a quickened ability to
exploit new market niches. It holds sway wherever people agree that
what’s bad can be made good, what’s good can be better, and the word “best”
works best as a floating definition, a glittering carrot that lies always
ahead of us as we continually sharpen our skills, develop our talents and
discover and embrace new potentials in ourselves and the world.
When our personal story is centered in the Paradigm of
Evolution, we see our own best years and any potential Golden Age for Humanity
lying always before us in the future, and tend to view past events and
present experience less as definitive indicators of who we are than as
steps along a never-ending path of "becoming.” Our definitions of
what we expect to "become" may change many times over the course of a lifetime,
but, in the present moment, we are nearly always motivated by a vision
of what we hope to be or achieve in the next 5, 10 or 20 years. When
our vision changes, as when new information requires us to reevaluate our
plans, or we simply get distracted by a new, more exciting vision, we quickly
rewrite our life stories to redefine abandoned goals as necessary, but
incomplete, stages in a continual process of the refinement and more effective
pursuit of our "true purpose."
Steeped in the future-focused Paradigm of Evolution,
the present state of the world, the behavior of others, and the relative
success or failure of our own lives are measured far less in light of what
has occurred in the past, or even the recent present, than in contrast
to the highest levels of future human development we can imagine – which
often leads us, following Darwin's injunction that survival belongs to
"the fittest," to show little compassion or even tolerance toward those
we deem "unfit" by virtue of their content-ment with the present or disagreement
with our bright prognostications of tomorrow.
This description of the three mega-memes controlling our
planetary human dream makes it appear that the Paradigm of Decline is cleanly
rooted in yesterday, while the Paradigm of Stasis stakes its claim in today,
and the Paradigm of Evolution in various possible tomorrows – but these
easily-categorized temporal differences are not the real root from which
our most pressing global difficulties spring. It's only when all
three worldviews look ahead to the coming years, decades and centuries
that the trouble begins. All of the present-day, human-survival-challeng-ing
clashes taking place between adherents of these disparate worldviews rise
out of the deeply contradictory visions of the human future from which
each paradigm "looks-back" in order to construct its version of the human
story to date. A person who believes that we are broken, sinful creatures
whose civilization is predestined by God to fall to ruins will, in the
present moment, make very different behavioral choices in the face of common
challenges than will someone who wants a future that looks just like today,
except maybe with a fatter paycheck, a nicer house, a bigger-screened TV,
etc. Those certain our present way of life can and should be maintained
forever will weigh cries of social injustice, reports of natural resource
depletion, or efforts to mitigate the environmental damage done by present-day
profit-gushing industry on a very different scale than will someone who
envisions human spiritual and cultural perfection as a future state of
wholeness to be attained through today's hard work and sacrifice.
To the extent that we perceive the world, ourselves and
each other through the lenses of these mega-memes, we are, if only unconsciously,
by crashing heads and working at cross-purposes, creating our chaotic present,
choice by choice, in service to the contradictory ends each story envisions
for our species. Common wisdom says, "If you want a different future,
work to change the present." But the counterintuitive truth is that
it is only when we re-vision our common future that the present can be
made to yield to change. We will not likely take a single step out
of our present darkness until we agree on at least the basic outline of
a shared vision of Humanity’s future capable of inspiring us to pursue
it together.
Where are we going?
_________________________________
KEY QUESTION EXERCISE #7
“Paradigm Shifting”
Examine your life through the lens provided by each of the paradigms described above. What kind of stories are you telling yourself? Journal at some length on the impact of the paradigms of Decline, Stasis and Evolution on at least these four areas of daily life:
Your religion/spirituality
Your romantic relationships
Your family/home environment
Your work life/Career
Just as much of the conflict taking place in the world
on an international scale is the result of clashes between these grand
memeplexes, so their memetic reflections within our personal psyches create
all manner of turmoil as they compete to control the reins of our perception
and behavior. Do you long to embrace a process of spiritual evolution
while you are committed to a religion steeped in the Paradigm of Decline?
Has your relationship with your spouse fallen into ruin, while you expect
your family and home life to maintain a happy stasis, or even evolve?
Do you experience your marriage and family to be falling into disarray,
even as your career evolves in new and exciting directions? Does
your devotion to spiritual evolution mask a deep boredom resulting from
a tediously static romantic, family and work life?
Determine which paradigm rules each of the four critical
dimensions of your personal present-moment experience. Feel free
to explore any additional dimensions you consider especially important
in your unique circumstances, such as artistic expression if that is a
significant part of your life, but be sure not to shy away from any of
the main four. In your journal, write out the story each area of
your life is fulfilling. Where does each “storyline” begin?
Where will it end? What’s happening in the present that contributes
to connecting that beginning and ending in a straight, coherent line?
Now rewrite each story from the perspective of a different
paradigm. If your marriage is in decline, write a story in which
it remains just as it is, forever, or evolves to new heights of intimacy,
romance and satisfaction. If your job is a repetitious, mind-numbing
bore, in your story, let it crash and burn, or else be transformed into
an exciting challenge. If, spiritually, you seek to convert the world
to your views so everyone can live under one set of God-given rules forever,
see the world in flames and nobody winning the Culture War, or see yourself
evolving beyond any concept of absolute right or wrong or need to control
anyone’s behavior other than your own. Change the ending of each
story, then construct a coherent narrative supporting that ending based
on your real-life experiences. You can disregard incidents that were
included in your original storyline, and make central things you edited
out altogether the first time around, like the times your spouse was kind
to you instead of evil, but don’t make anything up. Repeat this exercise
until your have three complete stories written out for each major area
of life – Religion/Spirit, Romance, Home and Work – for a total of twelve
(or more, if you added elements) stories. If all of the narratives are
self-consistent and are constructed only from real life-experiences, and
none of the predicted futures have, as yet come to pass, which one is “true?”
Why?
In Key Question Community groups, gather to share your
life-stories. Take turns relating all twelve narratives to one another,
investing equal sincerity in each recounting. Tell each story as
if it were the one and only truth, then start over, from a new perspective,
which becomes the only legitimate interpretation of events. Switch
again and again, until all versions of everyone’s life-story have been
told. In large groups, this can take a while, so break up into sub-groups
or even pairs, then switch off periodically.
When everyone has had an opportunity to share all twelve
versions of their personal life story, mix all the written narratives up
on the floor and have everyone select twelve from the pile at random.
Repeat the process you just completed, this time, with all sincerity, recount-ing
whatever versions of whatever stories wind up in your stack as if they
were your own. Some of them may be yours, by simple luck of the draw.
Make no distinction between your own stories and everyone else’s.
Whatever “slice of life” you find before you, grab a sympathetic ear and
“tell it like it is…” Don’t forget to be a sympathetic ear, as well!
NOTE: One great truth we discover upon awakening
into Stage Three Individual Awake awareness is that we are not distinct
and separable beings in the way we believed we were while lost in Stages
One and Two slumber. Our individual enlightenment liberates us from
the limiting constraints of our personal paradigms, but it does not free
us from the greater dream of the planet, which remains inescapable until
all Humanity awakens together into Stage Four Limitless Frontier consciousness.
The Simplest Path is, therefore, intentionally couched in the language
of the Paradigm of Evolution – not because it is the "one true meme" (there
is no such animal), but rather because, as Stage One and Two sleepers and
Stage Three awakened individuals, functioning wholly outside the context
of one or the other of these grand planetary-dreamplexes is simply not
an alternative. And of the three available options, only the Paradigm
of Evolution offers the possibility of a future that is radically and positively
different from the present, and which allows for the active pursuit of
that future by individuals and groups. When, as a species, we eventually
reach Stage Four Limitless Frontier consciousness and the communal human
dream is dispelled, we will almost certainly find the evolutionary metaphors
that inspired us to break the bonds of meme-enslavement dissipating into
nothingness right alongside apparitions of apocalypse and stasis.
And that’s okay. Like astronauts enabled to escape Earth’s gravity
by the push of a mighty rocket, once free, we should not be troubled by
the sight of our spent stages falling away behind us. We will have
reached our destination, and arrived there with an awakened group mind
capable of appropriately responding to whatever reality we find beyond
the boundaries of the dream. The Paradigm of Decline and the
Paradigm of Stasis promise no such transition, or even allow for its possibility,
so our collective dream-choice is clear. Evolve or perish!