Paradigm Lost, Paradigm Found: It's Time to Vote
I’m seeing something. I have begun to call it “The ‘What does it mean to be human?’ paradigm shift.” I am currently seeing two distinct understandings of what it means to be humans together on this planet; in one sense they run on two distinct operating systems. I believe we will soon see which paradigm gets the majority vote from our human species of consciousness.
From what I can see, it appears that the paradigm that had been going on when I arrived here has begun breaking down and spinning apart as it comes to the end of its multi-millennial long run as the dominant understanding. This paradigm is responsible the insane disparity and suffering and stress most people in our world have to deal with. It is continuously conditioned by the corporate and alternative media, which skillfully incite distractive divisiveness and opposition among us. We could call this one, “The Disconnected, Separation and Reification Paradigm.”
The second understanding I am seeing has been emerging within and among us for quite some time and, it is becoming increasingly visible if you know how to look. However, even though this second paradigm initiates a higher order of harmony and integrated complexity, it has not yet gotten much press within the corporate and, so called, alternative media. This more integrative paradigm is grounded in the following facts: the one that is All-That-Is is, in fact, all of Itself; everything is interconnected; we are all in this together; and, we can begin choosing to create a much more enjoyable world as we understood how our consciousness works to manifest the life we are experiencing and we then began exploring the ways we could collaborate for the benefit of all of us. We could call this one, “The Recognizing The Underlying Reality, Deconstructing Our Conditioned Misunderstanding and Learning to Live Together from The Always, Already Present Ground of Our Natural State Paradigm.”
Ok; I recognize that name might be a little long. Perhaps we could shorten it by understanding that clusters of us within our human species of consciousness has begun on the path of redeeming and resolving all of our mind-made, divisive polarizations; we are beginning to sense and attune to the experience of our shared oneness with each other and with All-That-Is. This focus is spreading among us. Then, we could just call this emerging paradigm, “The Unified Awakening Paradigm”
In brief, within the confines of The Disconnected, Separation and Reification Paradigm, the operating system for our shared mind-world/dream-body, or representational field, has been designed around the fundamentally mistaken notion of disconnectedness and separation. With that as a basis we inevitably end up creating an abstract, mind-made world. All the interconnected systems and processes that combine and collaborate to co-create this complex, dynamically alive world, including all out human embodiments of consciousness – all these interrelated information/energy metabolizing and exchanging systems and processes have been represented as, rather static, separate “things” in this mind-world. This mistaken separation and reification is reflected in the languages with which we communicate and think. This constitutes the underlying operating system of The Disconnected, Separation and Reification Paradigm that we’ve been conditioned into for many centuries. The rest is history.
We have all, pretty much, been raised to regard ourselves, others, and the world as things and collections of things. We have been reducing complex, interconnected living systems to labels and reifying descriptions; then we take our mental narrative about these “things” to be the reality of who we are, who they are and what is real. So, we have lived in a world where pretty much everything and everyone is divided from and perceived to be in antagonistic opposition against everything and everyone else. The Disconnected, Separation and Reification Paradigm produces a mind-made world of lack and fear. As mentioned above, in my opinion, this mind-world is no longer viable and many of our human-designed systems built upon this fundamental misunderstanding are breaking down and flying apart. That’s why it has begun to loose our vote.
As we have begun to awaken together, the emerging acknowledgment of the inherent interconnectedness of everything can take many forms including: an intellectual acknowledgement that the quantum, zero-point field is the singular, underlying energetic ground out of which everything emerges; an emotional recognition of and sense of being embedded within the interdependent and mutually sustaining dynamics of all the physical, inter- and intra-species systems of the ecosystem of this amazing planet; a direct recognition of the living awareness which both transcends and subsumes everything occurring within it in each now moment; as well as realizing that All-That-Is is all of itself and we are, each and all, wholly in, of and by this One. Gradually, for most of us, this emerging recognition of our shared oneness becomes the felt-sense of our experience of ourselves and our lives.
In a sense, “waking-up” simply means, we’ve begun understanding reality differently; we come to understand the nature of our consciousness and how it creates our experience, differently. This cuts across all domains of our experience and participation in life. We discover the fundamental, underlying operating system for the consciousness that we are. It is like we’re finally getting the Operator’s Manual for how to optimize these organisms and be humans together on this planet. In short, we recognize that what we give our attention to becomes our experience and we start making wiser choices about what we are choosing to focus on. Our interests shift from the old paradigm to the emerging paradigm.
As we are learning about the mechanism of conscious creation, it begins dawning on us that there are two kinds of thoughts and intentions, which have nearly antithetical effects on our subsequent experience. There are thoughts and intentions that are derived from the old paradigm and they both recreate and they perpetuate the disconnected and inevitably dissatisfying experiences of the old paradigm for both ourselves and those around us.
When we think these thoughts and find ourselves holding these intentions, we experience some kind of collapse or constriction or a compensatory, comparative and inflated self-sense. We begin recognizing that the discomforts and dissatisfactions of our lives are mind-made and we perpetuate them by repeating our narratives about them to ourselves and others. This is the endlessly repetitive nature of life when we have been running the operating system of The Disconnected, Separation and Reification Paradigm. We always seem to recycle the same old, same old.
Although our old paradigm was fundamentally misguided, it did make use of the innate capacity of consciousness to manifest what it is focused upon into our experience. Our awakening involves recognizing and then applying this function of consciousness to repattern our nervous system/psyche/relational field in resonant alignment with our natural state.
We all, always, have the built-in ability and the inalienable right to focus our attention where we choose. We may not initially be vey skilled at holding our attention where we choose; but we can always choose to direct our attention. And, when we notice our mind has gotten distracted, we can choose again and refocus where we want to. In this manner we develop our ability to hold our conscious attention steady and we repeatedly immerse our organisms in the expansive, harmonious resonances of the underlying truth - our natural state.
If we don’t yet have clear recognition of our natural state, we can attune ourselves to it by choosing thoughts and intentions represent and evoke the qualities that are natural expressions of our natural state. As we turn toward and hold our attention on the thoughts and intentions that are both aligned and harmonious with the resonances our actual being, we start to notice sensations and feelings start to emerge in our conscious awareness. These sensations and feelings are the emerging, experiential evidence of our more aligned thoughts and intentions beginning to manifest. In other words, as we focus attentively toward our actual being, our experience of the present moment begins revealing the feelings and qualities of our natural state. When we do this, we are deciding to close a feedback loop within our consciousness.
And so, rather than recycle our conditioned patterns of focusing on fear and doubt and lack, of thinking about what’s wrong, what’s lacking and how they should be different; we are beginning to deliberately create the world we want to live in by training ourselves to focus differently.
We can, for example choose to intend to experience peace. We can readily do this as a contemplative experiment to begin collecting evidence that this principle actually works. With enough repetition, we compile the evidence; we develop conviction, confidence and a commitment.
Try this for a few moments. Recognize your can choose to offer your attention to whatever you want to. Hold and intention to experience peace in your conscious awareness and then, attend openly to the living field of sensations within and around the physical body. Choose to continue noticing the felt-sense¬ of this field of sensations while continuing to hold the intention to experience peace. Bit-by-bit patterns of sensation emerge which coalesce into recognizable aspects of peace emerging within awareness. As we continue to hold our open focus, the experiential nuances of peace continue to slowly be revealed to us. After a little while, we notice that we feel peace. Then, after attending openly a bit more, we are peace.
The most important thing to notice about this little exercise is that within a few moments intending to experience peace and staying openly attentive to our felt-sense, we began experiencing peace. We can do this again and again in a thousand different ways and as we do, we will transform the experience of our life and our expression within it.
Imagine for a moment what would happen if this method of exploring the qualities of our natural state really appealed to you, and you began to consistently choose attuning your nervous system/psyche/organism in alignment with our natural state. Again and again holding the intention to experience and then attending to the emergent experience with words like: kindness toward self and others, caring, ease, contentment, courage, compassion, equanimity, joy, oneness, expansiveness, silence, presence, harmony, flow, confidence, safety, trust, forgiveness, unconditional love. The list is endless.
What different world might you come to live in?
The Emerging Paradigm of Awakening
Awakening involves noticing and becoming interested in the very same awareness that is aware of reading this sentence. This is the very same awareness that has always been right here in every moment of our lives. It’s worth noticing that awareness of being is always present throughout our lives. The continuous presence of awareness is what makes now, now! Even the abstract memories of the past and anticipations of the future are always experienced as part of the flow of experience through the living awareness of now. How is it possible we have not noticed this?
It seems our attention has been totally absorbed in the conditioned narratives in our minds. We have been living within that mind-made representation of ourselves and others. And because of this, we’ve managed to always overlook the presence of awareness. With the rarest of exceptions, awareness has never been pointed out to us. We weren’t taught to notice the living awareness of now and we never learned how to focus our conscious awareness on its qualities and characteristics to create alignment with and reliance upon the silent intelligence of our natural state.
If, by chance, we have noticed awareness, most of us discounted it’s having any significance for our lives. This is called, “being asleep,” in spiritual literature. While we’ve been living under the influence of The Disconnected, Separation and Reification Paradigm our species of consciousness has been co-creating our shared life on Earth as what’s been called our ‘human karmic vision of samara’ in the East and ‘Mammon’ or the ‘Tower of Babel’ in the religions of the Book.
Awakening involves realizing we have been asleep. We come to understand the manifesting mechanism of our consciousness by which we have co-created and perpetuated the reality that emerges from living within the confines of our mistaken Disconnected, Separation and Reification Paradigm. Taking back the authority to focus where we choose, we begin to turn our attention more and more toward the qualities of our shared, awakened state. As we increasingly do so, these expansive, peaceful and beneficent qualities emerge more and more within our lives. This harmonic alignment resonates behind the scenes and influences the people and events around us.
As we release our conscious awareness into deeper silence and presence, the narratives we’ve been telling ourselves about our separate self-with-other and our separate self-in-the-world are being recognized for what they are and they are being seen through. We release our conscious awareness from the habit of these old, patterns more and more deeply, more and more frequently into the silent intelligence of our awakened presence. As they get digested, their energetic imbalances get redeemed and their hidden qualities get revealed.
Perceptions of the world, sensations in the body and thoughts and images in the mind will continue to perpetually appear as experience within awareness only to be replaced by whatever emerges next. More and more frequently, we notice and come into the resonances of the ever-present, peaceful conscious awareness, through which this stream of experience flows. From this unreifying, open presence our expression is spontaneous, appropriate and beneficial.
Rejoice! Be grateful! We are beginning to understand how to use our intention to shape the experience that emerges for us. We are beginning to discover how to align more and more with the ever-expanding openness of our natural state; how to create and co-create our lives and our world for the benefit of all of us.
I imagine you can tell which paradigm has my vote. And, you?