the paradigm conspiracy

8/8/2019 The Paradigm Conspiracy

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for a narrow worldview. Academic inquiry becomes an in-your-head addictionquibbling esoterica with rabid acrimony, fiddling while Rome burns. As for government service, its power addiction from the bureaucrats who throw around their paper-pushing weight to the big-timers who become brokers for corporate conglomerates.

Process addictions are every bit as deadly, because they underlie substance addictionsas well as just about every social and global ill weve got. Theyr

e the invisible killers, the ones we dont suspect, but the ones that made millionaire Ivan Boesky raid savings and loans to become a billionaire, leaving in hiswake thousands who saw their life-savings disappear. As Boesky was later to admit, Its a sickness I have in the face of which I am helpless. Nor was Boesky alone in his sickness. Since the 80s, weve witnessed an army of greed-addicted corporateraiders, who made the jobs and pension funds of millions vanish overnight.

Process addictions arent limited to movers and shakers, though. Ordinary folks following the right diet and taking the right exercise are dropping dead at age thirty-five from workaholism, relationship addiction, anxiety, and stress. If all these substance and process addictions dont afflict us, they nonetheless affect us. While addictions to drugs, food, alcohol, sex, or work hit us one

by one, addictions to money, control, divisiveness, status, and official-thinkoppress us together. We cant have power-addicts running the world and not experience the consequences. Even when we try to claim its business or government as usual, we find ourselves suffering from global plagues made invisible by their familiarity.

But a familiar plague is no less deadly. As Anne Wilson Schaef points out, a deadly virus is a deadly virus, even if the entire population has it. Alcoholics Anonymous holds that addiction is a progressive, fatal disease. Schaef believesand we agreethat this is true, no matter what form the addiction takes. Ourlungs may give out from tar and nicotine, or our hearts may give out from stress. We may die from the greed that destroys the environment or from a nuclear chain reaction set off by a someones power play. Addictionsubstance or process, actedout privately or on the world stageis a fatal illness that we ignore at our peri

l. Not that this is news. We cant read the papers or watch TV without wondering:What on earth is going on? We have the knowledge and technology. We have the resources, human and natural. We even have the desire. Why cant our social, economic, and environmental problems be solved? Why do we live from crisis to crisis?

Addict-making systems. Neither substance nor process addictions arelimited to one race, sex, economic class, region, or occupation. Rich and poor,conservative and liberal, male and female, Hispanic, European, African, Asian, and Native Americans share the same disease.

When something so deadly cuts across society, we have to look at what we share: our social systems. In her 1987 ground-breaking book, When Society Becomes an Addict, Schaef suggests family dynamics, school rules, workplace policies and practices, corporate hierarchies, government workings, media messages, as well as cultural and religious belief-structures all operate in ways that setus up to behave addictively. In fact, society itself, Schaef writes, is an addictive system.

Thats a strong statement, yet the more we understand addiction, the more it seems like an understatement. Award-winning teacher John Taylor Gatto, for instance, pulls no punches about the messages schools send through their structure: I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences,the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax t

hem into addiction and dependent behavior.

In When Money is the Drug, counselor and writer Donna Boundy sketche


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s a similarly addict-making picture for corporations. The level of thinking-distortion that takes over people in these systems is astonishing.

The Paradigm Conspiracy

Whats going on? Why are systems betraying their service to us? Instead of performing their rightful functions of educating (schools), nurturing (fami

lies), promoting public good (governments), managing the shared household (businesses), and inspiring us to find and fulfill our lifes purpose (religious institutions), theyre abusing us and turning us into people we never wanted to be. Why?

Enter paradigms. Back in 1962so long ago John Kennedy was still alivehistorian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn gave an analysis of how systems change (or dont) in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that rockedthe intellectual world. He wasnt talking about addictive systems but about the system of scientific research, which has its own brand of obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Introducing the term paradigm, Kuhn said that scientists operate frommental modelsparadigmsthat shape everything they think, feel, and do. How scientists perceive and interpret experience is shaped by their internal structure of beliefs and conceptstheir paradigm. If something is wrong, the paradigm is the place to look to find out why.

To raise paradigm issues is to reflect on the ideas or concepts wereusing as our map of realityour world view, life perspective, philosophy, or mental model. Whatever we call it, its powerful stuff. To look at our paradigm is to look at the blueprint were using to build our worlds.

How do paradigms start? They usually begin with some exemplary modelNewtonian science or Einsteinian relativitythat weaves together theories, standards, and methods in a way that makes better sense than anything else. To share a parad

igm is to share a commitment to rules that define how a scientist acts and reacts. No part of scientific activity is outside the reach of the paradigms influence. Its as if scientists energies get poured through the paradigms mold, and whatevercomes out is stamped by that all-encompassing model.

In the decades since, Kuhns paradigm-concept has been applied to every discipline, from the arts to business. And rightly so. We experience our livesthe way we do because of the paradigms we carry around. In computer terms, paradigms function like the central operating system of consciousnessthe supra-program that transforms undefined perceptions into something we call our experience. They give us the mental tools to make sense of life and survive in it. We may notbe able to summarize our paradigm in ten words or less, but our every thought is paradigm connected, even paradigm created.

Development Within A Paradigm

Given the power of paradigms, two kinds of development follow. The first occurs within the paradigms framework. The second chucks the paradigm and forges a new one.

Normal science, as Kuhn calls it, is the first kind of development. Practitioners operate within their mental model and pursue its implications to thenth degree. Working inside the prevailing paradigm is the secure, accepted, andwell-rewarded way to do science.

In fact, the paradigm gets so comfortable that scientists forget that its there; it becomes functionally invisible. They way they see things is justthe way things are. For them, there is no paradigm between their ideas and reali


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ty. Applied to life, the normal-science phase is business as usual, families asusual, politics, churches, schools, and professions as usual. When were ticking away within a paradigms framework, the norm is well defined, and we conform. Coping skills mean finding ways to fit into the norm, whether its healthy or not. In fact, healthy is whatever the paradigm says it is. Becoming healthy means adjustingto the paradigms definition.

Paradigm Shifts

The revolutionary development comes when the paradigm reaches a crisis. It doesnt solve problems the way it once did. Anomaliesthings that the paradigm cant explainstart accumulating. Paradigm-health starts making us sick. More andmore, the paradigm doesnt work. Thats when scientists are challenged to shift paradigms by moving into a phase Kuhn calls extraordinary science. But, extraordinaryscience isnt easy. In language suited to academia, Kuhn describes how scientistsfreak out. Everything they ever learned is called into question. During the revolutions in physics early in this century, even Einstein, no slouch in forward-thinking, wrote, It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.

The more the paradigm fails to do its job, the more old-paradigm scientists try to make it work. The paradigm is ripe for a revolution, but becausetheyve forgotten that they even have a paradigm, scientists conclude instead thattheir world is falling apart. Solutionsalternative ways of doing sciencedont exist. As far as theyre concerned, theyve explored all the possibilities, and the onlyoptions they see dont help. Theyre too paradigm-bound to notice that theyre stumbling over the limits of their own models.

The Paradigm: Cause of Soul-Abusive Systems

Extraordinary science describes the situation we face today. Were not e

xperiencing paradigm-norms as healthy, either personally or globally. The blueprint for our families, schools, businesses, and governments isnt working. Its causing our shared social systems to function abusively and to make us sick as a result. Happy people and healthy systems dont turn addictive, life-destroying substances into the biggest growth industry on the planet.

Wed think changing a paradigm thats not working would be easy, but itsnot. As Kuhn observed, the paradigm-cause of crises remains invisible to old-paradigm practitioners. We dont need a new paradigm, they believe, we just need to make the one we have work better. Nothing is wrong with our social systems, sincethat would call the underlying paradigm into question. Instead, when things dontwork, something must be wrong with us. Blame certain people and label them as the troublemakers. We need more discipline, more restraints, old-paradigm experts advise us, more tests and tougher grading systems, more hard-nosed business-management practices, more God-fearing, sex-repressing piety, and more laws with stricter enforcement.

In other words, according to the prevailing paradigm, coming down hard on people isnt abuse. Its how we create healthy families, schools, businesses,governments, and churches, because it rids us of the sinful, ignorant, or otherwise unruly souls that muck up the social machinery. If things dont work, the solution is to take away more rights, stifle more creativity, intimidate more people, build more prisons, and bring back the death penalty. More fear keeps peoplein line.

This paradigm touches every part of our livesbut invisibly. We dont realize that the paradigm is there, which means we dont recognize its role in creat


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ing our social institutions. As long as the paradigm remains hidden, we dont seewhats causing system-wide suffering, which means we cant stop it.

The paradigm of control and power-over. What kind of paradigm requires that we blame individuals, intimidate, and punish them in order to keep our social systems healthy? Like a complex tapestry, the paradigm has many threads, butthe overall pattern has to do with control: Who has power over whom, and how is

a power-over relation maintained? Riane Eisler, in her pioneering work, The Chalice and the Blade, calls this the dominator model, contrasting it with the partnership way. Domination is the paradigms driving issue, and for a reason: in this world view, top-down control is necessary for social order.

According to the power-over modelwhat we refer to as the control paradigmif somebody doesnt control us, our social systems will fall into chaos. Archaeologist John Romer notes, for instance, that the Roman Emperor Diocletian, in anattempt to hold a ramshackle empire together, made a state where animals, land andpeople were all tightly organized and controlled.Like Diocletian, authorities oftoday believe that nothing would work if we each did our own thing. To have order, we must do what the authorities tell us to do.

Soul: the big threat

Now come the threads: to be controlled, we have to be unplugged fromcompeting sources of control. The major threat to external control is our internal guidance systemour souls.

Soul refers to our deep presence. Its our inner connectedness to whatever we take to be Being, God, the One, the whole, or the ground of creation (toparaphrase theologian Paul Tillich). Physician Larry Dossey describes the soul as some aspect of ourselves that is infinite, beyond the limits of space and time.Its our direct link to reality.

This whole-connected core is the source of our talents and the wellspring of creativity. Its also what gives us the conviction that our lives have meaning. When we live from our souls, we feel alive and vital, and we take seriously the idea that were here for a purpose.

To us, our souls are our best friends and most trusted guides. But to the control paradigm, theyre the enemywhat has to be removed in order for external control to work. Only when were sufficiently disconnected from our inner compass will we follow outer demands.

Get rid of the troublemakers. For fear of chaos, social systems adoptthe control paradigm and run with it. Through all sorts of institutionalized policies, we get the message that were unacceptable as we are, but that if we surrender ourselves to the social system (the family, school, business, profession, orreligion), well become acceptable. Our souls are sloppy and unmanageable troublemakers; they clog the systems efficient workings, and were better off without them.

This isnt

reality

talking; its a paradigman old one. Maybe sometime in the dim, dark recesses of human evolution a control-based paradigm may have served the specieswere skeptical about thatbut its not serving us now. The more power-over systems zap our inner lives, the less social order we have. Its a paradigm in crisis, and its creating neither personal nor global health.

Two paradigm conspiracies. As long as the paradigm remains invisible

, were stuck. The prevailing model stymies change. Every time we try to move in anew direction, the old paradigm kicks in and intimidates us into doing the sameold, soul-diminishing stuff.


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Thats the first paradigm conspiracy, the one that blocks our best efforts to confront crises and change.

But one paradigm conspiracy deserves anotherthe leap into extraordinary-science. True, paradigm shifts are full of uncertainties, trials and errors, hiccups and false starts, not to mention soul-searching forays into the unknown. W

e never know if weve come up with the right paradigmor even if there is such a thing. In extraordinary science, we let everything go into flux. Yet nothing conspires to change our world so completely as doing precisely that.

The most conspiratorial part of a paradigm shift is that it lies within the power of each of us to do it. Paradigms arent Godzilla monsters; theyre ideas. Their power comes from our shared commitment to them. The minute one personstarts to explore alternative models, the paradigm no longer holds the same power.

As Marilyn Ferguson explained in The Aquarian Conspiracy, the word conspiracy comes from conspirare, which means to breathe together. A new cultural parad

igm begins with each person stepping out of the old and daring to breathe something new. The movers and shakers are powerless to prevent a paradigm shift, once wetogether breathe a paradigm-revolution into being.

Walking the Truth vs. Sleepwalking

We are not walking the full truth of who we are because we

re "sleepwalking", unconscious of our immense abilities. Instead, we

ve come to believe that those abilities don

t exist for us. Even people educated at the best schoolsin this system experience education as indoctrination. The advantage for power-over institutions is obvious. People no longer indulge in big-picture thought. Control paradigm systems want the human brain to be an obedient machine, not a mind.

The Control Paradigm Posing as a "Philosophy"

The dumbing down - becoming less than who we are - brings us face toface with one of the control paradigm

s most powerful devices for achieving control. The control paradigm presents itself as a "philosophy", as if it

s innocently telling us what

s what. It even insists that its mechanistic, materialistic,control-measured picture of reality depicts the "real world" and tells us how to be practical in the world of facts and things, dogs eating dogs and sharks eating whatever. The more our reality can be reduced to objects, this "philosophy"tells us, and the less we trouble ourselves with ideas, values and other intangibles, the more we understand the "realities" of the control universe.

Adopting this philosophy as "the most practical way to maximize ourpersonal sphere of control", we don

t notice that we

re made controllable in theprocess. To "buy into" the "philosophy" is to become controllable by its "values" of external rewards and suggested into a view of ourselves that is not true to our nature and potential as True Human Beings. But, the control paradigm isn

tphilosophy. It doesn

t encourage free thought or dialogue. It doesn

t develop our minds or souls. It doesn

t invite inquiry into its core assumptions, strategies, responses and goals. Instead, it functions as a mind-control trance.

The control paradigm comes across as "the one way" to experience reality, and it doesn

t make room for alternative perspectives. To do so would go against the control agenda. As a result, the control paradigm in truth has little

in common with philosophy and much in common with propaganda and mind control methods - trance inducers, the kind Hitler was skilled at using.


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Trance Guises

In order to work, mind control methods must be hidden or pass as something seen as socially acceptable. The trick to a manipulative trance - as opposed to a therapeutic one - is that it remains unnoticed. The trance-inducers need a good guise. Conditioning and manipulation of others are always weapons andinstruments in the hands of those in power, even if these weapons are disguised

with the terms "education" and "therapeutic treatment". The control paradigm uses all of the above, but ultimately posing as a "philosophy" is its greatest cover. Posing as a "philosophy" lends the control paradigm an "air of authority". Ifwe recognized mind-control methods, saw through their disguises, and named themas such, they would lose their effectiveness.

Anatomy of a Trance

Selective focus that by-passes the critical faculty. A trance stateis when our minds voluntary choose to bypass their critical faculty and focus selectively, with consciousness fixated and focused to a relatively narrow frame of attention rather than being diffused over a broad area.

Suggestibility

Humans can be highly suggestible, which allows the by-passing of thecritical faculty. It is a matter of record how subtle cues and suggestions caninfluence and even control people

s minds and behavior. But "I

m not in trance!"- Hypnosis is in fact not so much a "state" but a process of selective focusingthat we choose to engage in, since many of the characteristics of the trance process apply to other processes of consciousness as well. In fact, when people are in a trance "state", many swear they

re not. They have no sense of altered consciousness when responding to suggestion and do not believe themselves to be intrance.

Trance as a Tool of Oppression - The Dark Side of Trance

The very power of the trance suggests its potential as a tool of oppression - for making us less than who we are.

Although there are positive uses for hypnosis, negative trance conditioning is very different. The mind-control uses of the trance process are thousands of years old and permeate control-paradigm institutions. Let

s take a lookhow two master oppressors, Hitler and Eichmann, used the process in the concentration camps:

Eliminating the critical faculty - Prisoners were taken from their homes, deprived of all possessions, stripped naked, shaved head to toe, and massshowered. They were treated as if they were sub-human. The impact of this was that all the assumptions they had ever made no longer applied. Inmates went into shock and their ability to think was shut down. The critical faculty was gone.

Narrowed focus on survival - The brutality of camp life made prisoners think only on the barest survival level. Every thought focused on how to staywarm, get food and avoid the wrath of the guards. Thinking became highly selective. No one could form any reliable strategies.

Normal emotions were removed and camp emotions implanted - Given theshock of the experience, emotions shut down, including the emotions of disgust,horror and pity. Apathy took over - the inability to care about anything. The p

risoners gave up their normal ways of responding. Instead, new responses were implanted ("suggested") - the desire to save one

s life, not to antagonize the guards, to submerge into the crowd, even to do "favors" for the guards in order to


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gain a "favored position". The responses that the guards wanted from the prisoners were unquestioning obedience, abject submission, and lack of personal will except for what the guards permitted. Suggestions were also implanted to the effect that human beings had no intrinsic worth, only extrinsic usefulness to authorities.

Aware of the trance or not? - Those who bought the trance didn

t las

t long. Those who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp

s degenerating influences, and their bodies soon followed suit. The trance of dehumanization overcame them withouttheir conscious awareness or resistance.

Coming out of the Trance to Walk Our Truth

Philosophy - Reawakening our critical faculties Prayer or mediation- Letting our minds roam the big picture

Correcting dehumanizing suggestions

De-suggesting cultural influences. We decide not to give dehumanizing trances our assent or energies. The man who stood in front of the army tank inTianenman Square in China was not in a control paradigm, fear and submission trance. His no-trance response apparently broke the trance of the driver of the tank. Another example is when the Berlin Wall came down. The wall symbolized a political control paradigm trance for almost 50 years, Once the control paradigm trance broke, the wall came down almost overnight.

Expanding awareness - Once we

re awake, we

re awake, and we have choices: trance or no trance. Of course, waking up from the control-paradigm tranceis not what society encourages.

Closed-System Models Don

t Work for Human Society

Preserving the "Norm"

Single individuals don

t create a society-wide climate where dialogue has no place. That

s the desire of the Control Paradigm, and it uses an effective device for doing it. The Control Paradigm designs social structures to function as closed systems. The rules, policies and structures of closed systems haveone purpose - to exclude input - outside, non-controllable factors - that couldinitiate system change. The first response to any problem is to "return thingsto the way they were". Closed social systems are not intentionally "evil" - theyare simply designed to maintain the status quo. Maintaining a pre-determined order is their mandate, which closed systems carry out through strict rules of control. As long as new energies can be either neutralized or made to conform, things continue on as before. The lines of power are preserved, and control is assumed.

Controlling the Variables - The People

Closed systems work to offset variables. That

s how they maintain equilibrium. In closed social systems, personal differences are the variables, androles are the way to offset them. For example, because nothing is more variablein marriages than spouses, or in families than children, in schools than teache

rs and students, in businesses than employees, in religions than spiritual seekers, or in society than citizens, closed social systems devise countless techniques for steering us back to role-governed equilibrium, called "family harmony", "


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The Nature of Reality isn

t closed: Another reason closed social systems don

t bring social order is that reality itself isn

t a closed system. Theold scientific belief systems such as closed-entropy energy systems, also used to reinforce closed-system social control patterns, are rapidly becoming transparently false as scientific research has shown over the last few decades. No matter how much closed systems try to control variables and shut out change, realitywon

t be shut out. We can

t make our social units into "islands of no-change", b

ecause the greater reality (the context on which our systems depend) is dynamic.

Reality is ever-shifting. It sweeps through our systems and impels change whether the system controllers like it or not. Two shining examples of closed systems, the Soviet Union and Communist China, tried to create "perfectly controlled, closed societies". It didn

t work. Their determination to establish closed-system control exacted a terrible price from their people. Individuality, freedom and creativity "had to be crushed". That

s the reason closed social systems don

t work.The Spiritual Evolution of Society Won

t Be Put Off: Human beings are every bit as dynamic as reality because we are made up of reality, and we are

constantly evolving in response to it. In contrast to Westernized control-oriented systems, including the systems "exported" to China, ancient Asian spiritual traditions defined humans as profoundly open systems, involved in constant self-transformation. Just as social systems can

t ultimately ignore the dynamics of reality, so too they cannot ultimately ignore our dynamics. No matter how hard closed systems try to fit us into "boxed", we don

t fit. The more systems negate this quality, the more we react as if we

re under siege. Our personal reality as beings-in-progress fights back, whether through conflict, addiction, social action ,recovery, spiritual awakening - or some combination thereof. Nor is this badnews. If social systems could make us into static units of conformity, what sortof societies would we create?

The Awareness Gap: Another reason closed social systems don

t work a

s a model for social order is that closed systems operate blind to the people inthem. Social order is not built on an awareness of what people think and feel,but on ignoring human needs and imposing system demands. That is why closed systems are typically out-of-touch with the real thoughts, feelings, and abilities of their members: they shut the door on this information. It

s not deemed "relevant" to "maintaining order".

Too many tragedies, too little order: In the end, closed-system control doesn

t work because it creates more tragedies than order. Dysfunctional patterns destroy. For example, the general approach to "health care" is a business.If health is a business, which demands its existence in perpetuity, than therecan by definition be no health in society. The pattern also involves "killing disease" while at the same time ignoring what it takes to create health. Nationalill-health is just one example of closed-system tragedies. The Western politicalsystems are another example.

Breaking Through Paradigm Defenses

We pay a heavy price for filtering reality as we do. When paradigm filters obscure our inner self to create an "outer self" that does the coping, the gap left inside grows into a chasm. The trouble intensifies when we identify with our paradigm filters. We begin to believe that to expose our filters is to expose ourselves, and worse, we begin to believe that to lose our filters is to lose ourselves, and that having "filters" is how we have survived. We fuse with them and believe that they

re all we

ve got.

Acceptable Paradigm Cloaking Devices - Paradigm Protective Dynamics


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The best way to make our paradigm "armor" invulnerable is to make itinvisible. What can

t be detected by the population can

t be shot down. When invisible, our paradigms avoid the risk of attack. We hide our paradigm

s filtering processes under acceptable cloaking devices - and many such covers will do thetrick.

Staying Within A Group

One way to make paradigm filters invisible is to surround ourselveswith people who share our set. We align ourselves with groups who take the sameparadigm for granted. Surrounded by people whose filters are familiar, ours blend in. Paradigm filters stay invisible, and we ask "What filters?" and "What paradigm?" Everyone shares the same agenda of keeping the paradigm filters unchanged. When paradigm issues do manage to surface, it

s to reinforce how "successful"and "right" the group

s paradigm is. The official lines get repeated and the catchphrases echoed. Those who question the paradigm and don

t speak its "language"are out.

It is because of this that cliques permeate paradigm-rigid societies

, with each group accusing the other of being "cultish". Paradigm dynamics, or dogmatics of each group resemble what goes on in mainline churches, corporations,schools, universities, governments, labor unions and non-profit organizations.The strategy of keeping filters invisible under the cover of a group-shared paradigm turns out not to be considered aberrational behavior, but the "required norm".

When Groups Support Growth - There are groups that support growth and evolution, and group-shared paradigms can be useful if they are exploring these areas involving full potential. Working with people of like mind takes us forward by leaps and bounds. As we work with others in this way, developments emergegreater than any one person could produce. Whether group involvement supports "filter evolution" or "filter fixedness", therefore, is a matter of paradigm development.

Compartmentalization of Paradigm Filters

Mechanism: Another way to keep paradigms invisible is to split our lives into compartments and to design paradigm filters for each "box". When we are convinced to split our perceptive world into separate pieces, we protect the paradigm filters we use for each piece. In a fixed area, certain paradigm filtersdon

t apply, and we don

t mix them with filters we use for a different box. That way, we never have to ask how it all adds up; it just doesn

t, and no one expects it to add up.

Social Result: Lack of Consistency. We don

t ask whether the valueswe use at work are the values we

d like our children to live at home. If we adhere to one religion or belief, we don

t want to hear about the views of another.By putting walls between our filters, we protect our overall filter arrangement.We avoid filter comparisons which would inevitably bring our paradigm out intothe open and subject it to revision. Some of the greatest leaps in knowledge andart - cultural paradigms - occurred when two or more societies interacted. Control paradigm isolation of societies prevents these leaps. Box-category thinking,valuable as it is for producing specialized knowledge, prevents this type of exchange. It forbids us even to attempt to integrate our filters with wider contexts - a process which paradigm evolution demands. "There

s no overall paradigm",we tell ourselves, which means our cultural paradigm stays "offstage", invisible.

Openness and Objectivity Issues

Another way to keep paradigm filters hidden is to "appear to be filt


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er-free", as if "we have no paradigm, no filters, and no covers for them either.For decades, scientists and social engineers hid filters behind claims of objectivity, pretending to be "unbiased observers". Claiming to be "open" and "skeptical", while rigidly adhering to paradigm dynamics, are other ways of hiding paradigms we

re not keen to question. Sometimes, claiming to be "open" is used as astrategy to make us appear paradigm-free, which guarantees that neither we nor anyone else has a chance to look at our filters. By appearing to be "big-minded",

we keep our paradigm close to the chest and off limits.

Use of Covers to Block Paradigm Awareness

If we are to evolve, we need to know what paradigm we

re using, so we can change it. Defensive covers block this awareness. How far are people willing to go to protect their paradigm? History shows that people will kill to protect what they "believe" to be the case. Changing paradigms, ways of thinking andperceiving the universe based on new information, can be scary for some people.No wonder the strategies for keeping paradigms in place are more developed thanstrategies for changing them.

Use of Social Taboos to Block Paradigm AwarenessOne of the most potent paradigm cloaking devices individuals and soc

ieties have is the taboo. A taboo prevents the questions we dare not raise, thethings we dare not do, and the ways we dare not think. When members of a societyobey taboos, they pretend that aspects of their lives do not exist. Problems are not problems, and obvious sources of trouble remain off-limits for discussion,and people are manipulated into not speaking of them. People let the social system throw walls of silence around them, so the system is not threatened by hearing the truth about what we

re experiencing. Most current social systems on the planet are maintained in a status quo state in this way.

Taboos About Sex - The actual function of the taboo on sexual matter

s in Western countries, which paradoxically exists at the same time as the maintenance of a strong focus on sexual matters, is to supplement and increase the focus on sexual matters in society. The same principles holds for gender-specifictaboos, which also have the function of suppressing different factors relating to wholeness of being and expression. Many of these taboos have the function of introducing the socially complicating factors of "guilt" and "shame", and are also included in some religious paradigms.

Taboos About Feelings - There is also another taboo which exists that makes feelings off-limits in some social system. People are programming "to bein control" of emotions. Even the words "emotion" and "emotional" are cast in negative connotations, and are often used to discredit a persons viewpoint. In fact, the process of socially programming the factoring-out of emotions is highlyconvenient for control paradigm systems, because if we cut ourselves off from how we feel under a situation of domination, we tend to "tolerate" it more readily, and we are programmed to disregard the pain when we witness control-system abuse to others. Control system abuse is seen on television 24 hours a day and termed "entertainment", which goes to show how deeply some paradigm elements are buried. Another phenomenon that arises is that the control paradigm feeds people with rationalizations, judgments and the ultimate ultimatum: "Things must be donethis way or chaos will follow".

Science Taboos - Many of the social control taboos in our society have in fact been inherited from science - what

s "real" and what is not, what wecan "talk about intelligently" and what is considered "superstitious" or "pseudo

-science". In general, the rule is this - "if you can measure something, manipulate it, predict its function and then replicate it (control the outcome of experiments on it) - "it

s scientific and real; if not, it

s imagination or illusion.


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" People are programmed to accept this approach to science because it reinforcesthe idea of control over the environment. Unfortunately, this strategy reducesthe idea of "knowledge" down to a matter of "control". We are led to believe that "knowing something" means being able to "control" it -- which is the control-paradigm epistemology. We are led to grant science this "authority" and we are programmed not to question it, even if it stands in the face of mountains of observed (but not reproducible, and therefore "anecdotal") evidence.

Science Taboos - The Wider Impact

Defining knowledge in terms of control raises questions. What kind of "control" does science give us? Control paradigm science inevitably disregardswider contexts, because wider contexts aren

t easily "controlled". To "gain control", scientists "eliminate variables" and "constrict the field". In fact, scientists learn early in their programmed training to think in narrowly focused ways and to disregard broader contexts, thus, the most defensible Ph.D. thesis is the most specialized one. A result of this process is that using narrowed controlthought processes, we find ourselves faced with wider-context problems. For example, we are stuck with nuclear waste with a half-life of 500,000 years and clou

ds of acid rain that kill forests. If the same money went into researching new evolutionary technologies, as the impression was given to the public in the early1970

s that it "would be", we wouldn

t have the problems we have today. But, apublic programmed to think along the same lines has simply ignored this simple idea.

Science Taboos - Ethics and Values

A very important point to make is that the taboos that insulate control-science from its impact on society also hide its values. The directions thatscience and technology take involve decisions based on values - control values.Nonetheless, taboos place science above ethics. In other words, control-sciencetaboos hide its decision-making process and the values that guide them. These v

alues and decisions affect the course of science. The fact that some scientificresearch gets screened out while other research receives both funding and publication is attributed to "the natural course of scientific development", as if there is no paradigm-based filtering going on. In fact, "there

s a whole lot of filtering going on". Various "experts" dominate each field of "inquiry" and also dominate the direction and "limits" of research. They give their "positions" at "conferences", where "reputations" may be "made" or "broken", and they edit the journals. Even more telling is the funding of research by industry. There is an unspoken but real incentive to present projects that support the agenda of work being done in various industries. Combinations of industrial, academic, and political interests influence, and even control, what should otherwise be open scientific research, in many cases research that could potentially save lives. The cancer and AIDS industries are good examples.

Science Taboos - "Accepted Practices"

Control-science decisions affect not only the direction of researchbut how that knowledge is applied. As long as some practice is labeled "scientific", people are programmed to be hesitant to ask whether it

s wise or cruel. Thestatus of "accepted scientific opinion" is often enough to put a theory, alongwith its applications, "beyond moral question". A good example would be the painful tests and surgery conducted on babies without anesthesia. Another would be that if you cut someone

s body part off while walking down the street, you

d go to jail. But if an obstetrician does it, without anesthesia, he gets paid for it.No consistency in this society. It sends a real message to baby boys about the

world they

re entering. Female circumcision and genital mutilation, permitted insome societies, sends an equally meaningful message to young girls.


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ill them or drug them until they

fit the norm

. Then our system would

work

".But, our systems don

t work, no matter how many people are drugged, subject to mind-control, lock up or kill. Instead, a chasm of silence comes between people and system realities.

Dialoguing Our Way to Social Balance and Harmony

As a response to the control-paradigm world around us, dialogue sends a liberating message. Dialogue is the real source of order in human societies.It communicates openness, trust, mutual respect, adventure and shared exploration. It is a response that invites paradigm shift in precisely the direction we want to make it, namely, toward soul-honoring interaction.

Discussion vs. Dialogue

David Bohm, the physicist, whose ideas on dialogue follow the Socratic tradition, believed that dialogue is an art that

s distinct from ordinary discussion. Discussion works like ping-pong - opinions are tossed back and forth toset whose views will win out. It

s a competitive game of scoring points: one-up

, one-down, argument and rebuttal. But, discussion has its limits. In discussion, our options are restricted to the starting point positions of each side. Discussion is not designed to increase options, only to narrow options. Discussion operates on a win-lose model.

Dialogue, in contrast, has a different dynamic. It

s purpose is notto establish a "victor" or to prove a question, but to "love the truth" and pursue it. We let truth be what it is, whether it happens to fit our paradigm agendas or not. We let out pursuit of the truth spill over our current thought boundaries, drawing us into areas we have not considered before. How does a dialogue response do this? David Bohm mapped out three criteria - three rules of dialogue.These rules cannot be imposed from without or faked. If inwardly we

re stuck ina one-up/one-down mode (a control paradigm response), we can try and create a di

alogue but it won

t happen. The exercise lapses into ping-pong. Real dialogue grows with soul connectedness. In paradigm terms, a dialogue response grows from soul connectedness assumptions and strategies. We simply love the truth and wantto explore it in the same spirit with others. Bohm said, "the purpose of dialogue is to go beyond any one individual

s understanding. We are not trying to win in a dialogue. We all wind if we are doing it right."

Bohm

s three criteria, listed below, will facilitate a dialogue response:

Suspending Our Paradigms - First, since truth is greater than our concepts about it, loving the truth means loving truth more than any one perspective. Even the best paradigm falls short of reality, which is infinite and surpasses our most advanced ideas. Both parties cannot respond in dialogue and be dogmatic about their respective paradigms. In dialogue, we stay open to exploring ourideas and perceptions from the ground up. Because reality is infinite, there isalways room for evolution. The first criterion for dialogue, then, is that participants must "suspend their assumptions". This takes work, because most paradigm assumptions lie in the shadows where we don

t notice them. Dialogue begins aswe put our models on the table for consideration. A dialogue response doesn

t trash what we

ve assumed so far. It simply keeps our options open, so we can discover the reality lying beyond them. Huxley once said, "Sit down before fact likea child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."

Honoring Each Other As Equals - Whereas the first criteria opens thewindow, the second lets the breeze blow through. The second of Bohm

s criteriatackles the control paradigm

s response directly, since the most common (and mos


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t internalized) barrier to true dialogue is the one-up/one-down model of interaction. We can

t have an open dialogue with people who have power over us or whomwe perceive as superiors. Bohm observed that "Hierarchy is antithetical to dialogue". Those in dialogue must treat each other as equal partners in the pursuit of truth, working as a team. Responding as colleagues, we support each other andcreate a space that

s safe for exploring the truth - where loving the truth is allowed. During the Challenger disasters in 1986, it was discovered that one of t

he factors involved was the unwillingness of upper management to listen to the concerns of the engineers who felt that the program was being rushed and insufficient testing time was allowed. Those in charge didn

t want to listen to feedbackthat didn

t fit their agenda and used their superior status to block it. Naturally, the process of evolving awareness raises differences. Responding to each other as equal partners does not mean we all must think alike. Differences enrichthe process. Instead of using differences to divide us, dialogue uses them to expand the possibilities we

re able to consider. According to Bohm, "In dialogue,a group accesses a larger pool of common meaning which cannot be accessed individually. Individuals gain insights that could not be achieved individually. Defending one paradigm or another isn

t the focus in dialogue. Broadening our awareness is the focus. The jockeying that goes on in hierarchies through win-lose disc

ussion becomes irrelevant.A Genuine Spirit of Inquiry - Freeing ourselves from internalized ra

nking is easier said than done. That is why dialogue needs a third criterion. Weneed to protect the dialogue atmosphere from our own histories of being shamed.One way to do this is through a facilitator who "holds the context" of dialogueand keeps the space safe for exploration and risk taking. Because dialogue requires that we reveal our deepest and most "unofficial" thoughts, it makes us vulnerable. Facilitators keep the factors of shaming, one-upsmanship and official-think at bay. They support the shift from discussion to dialogue by affirming differences and not letting participants become polarized in win-lose contests. Witha genuine spirit of inquiry, we don

t care who said what or which direction thedialogue takes. We are all on the same side in dialogue, pursuing a common ques

t for understanding.

One way of responding that supports a dialogue atmosphere balances advocacy and inquiry. Advocacy presents a position, while inquiry explores it. The more we each do both, the more our responses stay fluid, true to a dialogue context. When we advocate a paradigm perspective, for instance, we also open our thought processes to inquiry. We explain how we arrived at an assumption, strategy, response or goal, and why. We also keep the door open to rethinking our positions from the ground up. We reflect on our own paradigm and invite others to dothe same. That way, we don

t get stuck "defending one position". When others present a paradigm perspective, we not only inquire into their thought processes but also state our assumptions about what they are saying and acknowledge them asassumptions on our part. "What I

m hearing you say is..." Our assumptions may bepreventing us from grasping what others truly mean. The real message often liesbehind the words and can by the opposite of what

s spoken.

What

s Normal or Possible for Consciousness?

Awareness of paradigms and the possibilities that emerge with changing them carry enormous implications for how we understand consciousness. Are thelimits we experience in perception, learning, and knowing absolute, or are theyimposed by a paradigm-one that we can choose to have or not?

Psychic and paranormal experiences suggest that the limits imposed by materialist philosophy are not absolute. Even one case of powers that defy phy

sical limits proves what

s possible, whether these possibilities are commonplacein the current paradigm or not. By challenging paradigms that put our mental powers in straitjackets, we free ourselves to tap powers we

ve barely begun to ima


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gine.

Examples of mental powers defying so-called laws of matter abound. In addition to the volumes of literature on the subject, we

ve encountered many cases that we find fascinating, and several come to mind:

One young woman from Laos, a student of ours, endured several years

of harrowing escapes to reach America with her family. She experienced this journey between the ages of 7 and 9. Along the way, she and her family spent many months in concentration camps for refugees, where women and children were abused by soldiers. During this period of constant fear and trauma, she developed the ability to leave her body at will to guard herself and her family, especially whenshe was asleep. Years later as a college student, she was able to report everything that was said or done in her room or anywhere in the building while she wassleeping. Hers is an interesting case of what is now widely known as out-of-body experiences.

During the late seventies, a Swiss colleague of ours told of a little girl in Zurich who was having trouble in school because her vision did not sto

p with walls. She couldn

t see the blackboard because she was seeing through itinto the next room, where apparently things were more interesting. Her grades improved only when she was taught to make her vision stop with walls. The story was carried in the Zurich newspapers. Perhaps Mr. Swann or someone else reading this knows more about this case.

Then of course there

s research begun by Georgi Lozanov in Bulgariaand reported by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder in their books Superlearningand SuperMemory. According to learning studies going on all over the globe, ourminds are capable of vastly more than we ever imagined. If we have human brains, we

re geniuses, and the only reason we

re not experiencing our minds

powers is that they

ve been shut down by stress, negative programming, trauma, or mind-numbing boredom. Clearly, there

s more going on with consciousness and our human

potential than the official paradigm acknowledges. Again, the fact that extraordinary powers occur at all proves the possibility of powers that may be latent inall of us.

Seeking Paradigms That Fit Us

Imagine, for instance, a paradigm that describes us as free beings,moving in time, space, and matter through the powers of consciousness, unconstrained by demands for money and unconcerned by the quest for power or control. Imagine further a paradigm that honors us for who we are, that treats human beings-as well as all beings-as treasures of the universe, and that therefore places apriority on nurturing and developing our potential. In the current world where humans are "ownable", exploitable, controllable commodities-useful only insofar as they can either command or generate capital-such models seem utter fantasy.

According to spiritual teachings the world over, though, such modelsmore closely fit what they call "True Human Beings." Hindu philosophy, for instance, takes our potential seriously enough to categorize liberation as the fourth basic desire of human beings, the one that naturally arises in us after we

vegrown weary of pursuing the desires for 1) pleasure, 2) success, and 3) duty.

Liberation is the liberation to be who we are in the big picture, not to be narrowed by models that aren

t worthy of us. It

s the freedom to live from the inside out, to be guided by who we are in our essence, rather than to spend our lives juggling family, social, financial, religious, or other cultural expectations.

"Saving the Paradigm"


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If we don

t experience ourselves or each other as free and great beings, it

s not because we lack this potential but rather because the paradigm/cookie gadgets our cultures pour us through aren

t equal to our essence. We come out twisted, grasping, angry, and insatiable because we know we

re more, yet the cultural paradigm has no room for us. The paradigm can

t both acknowledge our innate worth and treat us as objects to be subjugated-objects that must be coercedinto systems that violate our dignity and potential by their very structures.

Born into the culture, what choice do we have but to be subjugated?Babies and children don

t have options but to submit. So we adapt ourselves accordingly. We conform to social systems by adopting the roles that go with them, narrowing ourselves to fit the cultural agenda. We become the competitive, insecure, obedient, brain dead, soul-disconnected creature that our social systems require. If we didn

t comply, there

d be no place for social systems to hook into us and control our behavior, which the paradigm says they must do in order to achieve social order.

But instead of social order, the paradigm generates violence and suffering-images of which we see everyday on the news and feelings of which we expe

rience as stress, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem or even self-hate. Theseimages and feelings say nothing about which alternative paradigms might better serve human beings or who we might be if we used less narrowing models. They simply give us feedback about our cultural paradigm.

But paradigm oblivious, we don

t interpret culture-wide pain as paradigm related. We don

t trace personal and social suffering back to the culturalparadigm and so set the stage for changing it. Instead, we save the paradigm bybelieving that humans must be fatally flawed and we ourselves more than most. Accepting the cultural paradigm that excludes what

s most valuable about us, we view ourselves in the mirror that social systems give us: a mirror of externals. Our paradigm options go unexplored.

Life in a Paradigm Controlled by External Reward Systems

In a paradigm of externals, externals call the shots. Instead of allowing us to be guided from the inside out (a formula for anarchy, the control paradigm claims), the paradigm controls our behavior through rewards and punishments. We come to think and act like Pavlov

s dog, salivating over the next bonus,a bigger kennel to call home, a fancier collar to sport, or a top dog position.The paradigm isn

t about developing our talents, abilities, or potential; it

s about making us controllable by giving or withholding external rewards.

To achieve this control, the paradigm grades each "thing" in a hierarchy of externals. The inner life means nothing compared to the outward characteristics indicated by our species, race, gender, age, status, group affiliation,and income. If dogs possessed the wealth of Bill Gates, for instance, they wouldn

t suffer in medical experiments, just as people who have money don

t work in sweatshops or sell their children into slavery.

That

s the problem with externals: they

re fine until they become the means for enslavement, which unfortunately they do almost immediately. When aparadigm puts external values first, consciousness dimensions are dismissed outof hand. Small wonder that the potentials of our minds and hearts-and all the values that go with them, e.g., meaning, compassion, justice, or wisdom-go undeveloped. A control paradigm has neither use nor place for them.

Closed Social External Control-Based Paradigms Don

t Like Discussin

g This

Naming paradigms and their power for good or ill isn

t a new insight


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; it

s as old as philosophy. It is, however, an overlooked insight in an age that can

t seem to shake a materialistic, control-obsessed paradigm-and for good reason. Reflecting on paradigms is the stuff of change, and changing paradigms isthe most fundamental and powerful change we can make.

To a paradigm of control, that

s not welcome. The sum total of our experience contingent on something as invisible and changeable as a philosophy? C

hange by paradigm shifts, which anyone can make? Powers of perception and creativity that defy rigid material boundaries? Humans as beings of immense powers andabilities? Once you let these cats out of the bag, there

s no telling what mindsets and institutions might be made obsolete.

Obsolete is precisely what established institutions of power and control don

t want to be. They learned from the fate of carriage and buggy whip manufacturers when cars came along. Established interests now make sure that questioning the neanderthal paradigm of burning things for energy triggers "War-of-the-Worlds" panic about destabilizing the world economy. Even the call for improvedpublic transit systems borders on subversive.

Stiff challenges face a paradigm shift on the simple level of out-there technology, frozen at a stage that Captain Picard sometimes finds among themore primitive human civilizations he encounters. What challenges might we faceif we embark on a far deeper level of questioning-on redrawing the paradigms that sort out who we are and why we

re here?

Plenty. If the cultural paradigm

s purpose is not to honor human potential but rather to make it an obedient servant to existing social structures,then nothing could be more threatening to the established order than a paradigmshift regarding our self-conceptions. We fit into society as it is now only as long as we don

t remember that we

re more and here for more.

Examples of Control Paradigm Lack of Interest in Developing Human P

otential

The agenda for traditional psychoanalytic therapy, for instance, isn

t to develop human potential; it

s to keep people functional in established social structures, however miserable their lives may be and however abusive or wrong-headed the social structures. "Well-adjusted" becomes a synonym for mental health.

But if someone is well-adjusted to being an SS officer in Nazi concentration camps, is that person mentally healthy? In Fire In The Soul, psychoneuroimmunologist Joan Borysenko writes of this narrow aim of therapy: "Sigmund Freud...believed that when a person was cured of neurosis the best outcome that could be expected was return

to an ordinary state of unhappiness.

" (New York: Warner, 1993, p. 54)

Psychotherapy

s official job is mopping up the mess that social systems make of our lives by convincing us that the mess is our fault, our failing,our screwiness. If we don

t conform, adjust, fit in, and measure up, something must be wrong with us. And psychotherapy has its truth: we may well be frozen ingrief or shock and not functioning at our best, but don

t the social systems that shape us deserve equal scrutiny, equal critical analysis?

Thankfully many therapists reject this paradigm and venture forth with their clients on the forbidden territory of meaning and human potential as well as of critiquing social structures, but it

s no easy task persuading insuranc

e companies to come along. Control institutions pay insurance companies to pay health professionals to keep people in their place, serving the established order.


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The Agenda for School Systems in a Control Paradigm

Nor are school systems committed to developing the more that we are.Schools are an arm of social structures, whether religious, governmental, or economic. According to the paradigm-defined needs of those structures, tapping human potential doesn

t create enough Dilberts to ensure the "efficient" running of

corporate, governmental, religious, and educational hierarchies.

In this century, business interests have dictated the structure of schools. Henry Ford quickly noticed that creative genius and intuitive knowing aren

t useful on factory lines. So he pioneered the "modern" school system that inculcates values and skills appropriate for 20th century work life: being punctual, obeying orders, enduring hours, weeks, and years of boring, repetitive tasks,not talking while working, not resting, keeping to the schedule at all costs. Our minds become casualties of industrialization.

Our souls end up casualties as well. Trusting our own judgment, thinking for ourselves, adhering to our values, and having confidence in our innate

worth don

t make us good foot soldiers for my-way-or-the-highway bosses. Only people with low self-esteem are sufficiently insecure to tolerate abusive work environments. Insofar as we believe we don

t deserve better, we adjust, becoming the kind of person that

s required to "do the job."

Obligingly, school systems produce people with precisely the low self-esteem that

s needed for worker "flexibility." Fears of being wrong, of not making the grade are fears confirmed for 90 percent of the population. That

s thepercentage who are required not to get A

s by the bell curve system, guaranteeing that 90 percent of everyone coming out of school believe that they

re incapable of excellence. Schools mirror back to students the mass message that "you

re just not good enough, but if you do what you

re told without question, you may get better and be rewarded." That

s a handy message to have installed in the psych

es of 90 percent of the population-handy for perpetuating corporate, religious,governmental, and professional tyrannies, that is.

All this modern schooling goes against what we know about the humanmind and how we learn-and have known for decades. Studies in learning show thatwe learn best when we

re most relaxed, yet schools maximize stress through fearof failure. Studies show that children learn most easily through cooperative learning, yet schools impose a competitive model. Studies also indicate that students

beliefs about their own learning abilities affect their performance-if theybelieve they

re good learners, they learn easily; if not, learning the simplestthings becomes difficult-yet schools systematically undermine students

confidence.

In these and many other ways, school systems perform virtual lobotomies on our psyches, producing graduates who

ve long since lost their joy in learning, who believe they must be right all the time and "know it all" or be condemned to outer darkness, and who experience post-traumatic stress symptoms at thethought of having to learn new things on the job.

On Cultural Non-Commitment to Human Potential

Alice Miller, a champion of the potential we all possess from birth,pulls no punches in her books-For Your Own Good in particular analyzes the social, cultural agenda of shutting down our potential. As she explains, the traditional rules of child-rearing passed down from generation to generation have nothi

ng to do with developing our potential, either emotionally, intuitively, psychologically, or intellectually. Their one agenda is control: control the child as soon as possible by any means, whether it

s by punishment, humiliation, intimidat


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ion, beatings, grading, whatever it takes to break the child

s will and autonomy.

The justification for this agenda is that children raised any otherway won

t fit into society when they grow up. According to this cultural paradigm-expressed in the rules of child-rearing-learning to forget who we are and to become what others want and expect us to be is the most important survival skill.

Our potential as human beings is irrelevant, a side issue, compared to our ability to conform.

Of course we

re supposed to believe that social systems have our best interests at heart and that obeying them is indeed "for our own good." If we conform properly, our potential will develop accordingly. But is this so? As we

ve seen, schools and therapy-two systems that you

d think would be committed to developing human potential-have no such commitment. In what system or area of theculture might such a commitment exist?

Governments are fully occupied with who has power over whom, who hasthe biggest budget, where money can be found, who wins which election or vote,etc. Developing the human potential of its citizenry is not a priority. If anyth

ing, it

s not on the agenda at all. The insider

s view that "the masses are asses" is music to ambitious politicians

ears, who then believe it

s their manifestdestiny to expand their personal power and become benevolent dictators. Dumb masses are easy to manipulate with slogans and half-truths. For their purposes, the less human potential the better.

As much as we value spiritual teachings, we can

t say that religiousorganizations have much commitment to developing human potential either, thoughgranted there are exceptions. Adhering to fixed doctrines, building congregations, raising money, meddling in the personal affairs of members, running down sectarian competitors, and using fear and guilt to exact obedience and tithing keepthem busy enough.

Businesses and corporations certainly don

t concern themselves withhuman potential, even though they sometimes pay lip service to it in the hopes of making employees more "productive." The bottom line is the bottom line, and ifhuman potential comes up at all, it

s considered a frill or luxury-"warm fuzzystuff" that doesn

t count in the "real world" of business except to mollify disgruntled workers or help them adjust to higher levels of stress.

Scanning the culture, we frankly can

t find any system that

s consistently committed to exploring human potential. If anything, our social systems regard human potential as an impediment, an annoying feature of human beings thatgums up the systems

otherwise efficient workings. If people would just learn their roles and stick to them, everything would work so much better.

If we didn

t know the paradigm behind these systems, we may find this lack of interest in human potential odd. Developing human potential seems crucial to keeping human civilizations vital and evolving, up to speed with the challenges that continually arise. Technology per se can

t save us, since we

re notusing the alternative technology we already have to remedy social and environmental ills. What we lack is the the wisdom and foresight, the honesty, the sense of meaning, justice, integrity, and the good to manage human affairs well. Thesearen

t technology issues but paradigm ones. Wisdom and foresight are precisely the potentials that a paradigm geared to domination and control factors out of us.

Making Some Changes

But no paradigm, even one that

s used to having the last word, is the last word. The human spirit, being what it is, doesn

t take kindly to soul-lob


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otomies and develops all sorts of responses. One is to join the lobotomizing dominators: do it to others before any more can be done to you. Another is to adoptroles and play along, to accept one

s lobotomized lot in life.

Addictions make both responses easier. We can lay off 5,000 employees and numb the pain with a 15 million dollar bonus. Or we can take drugs to makeit through the day in our Dilbertesque cubicles. Either way, numbing ourselves

with addictions of process (money and power) or of substance (drugs and alcohol)makes us forget the pain of living in a control paradigm culture.

By numbing us, addictions serve the established paradigm well: insofar as we forget pain, we don

t confront its causes. Lobotomizing systems go unchallenged, as long as we find ways to cope with being lobotomized.

That

s why recovery from addictions begins with recognizing pain. Acknowledging what we feel in social systems is the first subversive step toward acultural paradigm shift. A paradigm of control through externals unravels whenwe affirm the importance of what

s going on within. When pain counts with us-when we refuse to ignore it, "to put up and shut up"-the days are numbered for the

paradigm that

s causing us pain.

New World Views Bring the Onset of New Worlds

From this springboard begins the journey of transformation by paradigm shift. It took us 360 pages to explore this process in The Paradigm Conspiracy, so that

s a pitch both for whoever is reading this to get a copy and for us to close this electronic essay.

We

ll just say that when we

re too tired to explain the book to someone, we call it our revenge on the control paradigm, both for us and on behalf of our readers. But when we

re feeling more peppy, we say that the book has a hap

py ending, or at least holds the promise of one. Refusing to be trapped by dominating institutions on one hand and on the other claiming our essence, who we arein the big picture-what

s called the "soul" until a better term comes along-wefoment revolution of the most constructive, effective, and powerful sort. Each of us in our own ways participates in creating new worldviews, which in turn create new worlds within and without.

We thank you for taking the time to read our thoughts and reflections on this subject, and should you read our book, we hope you enjoy it. We don

tpretend to have the answers or to give the "correct" paradigm. Our best hope isthat the book gets the philosophical, paradigm-shifting juices going. That

s quite enough for us. The rest we leave to the human potential emerging in all of us.

Material Focus vs. Whole-System Focus

Focusing on Things and Materialism

Factor

Focusing on Whole Systems

Mechanistic model in which observer & observed are seen separate, unrelated andnot connected in any way except by virtue of physical perception in closed system entropy universe.


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Physics

Taking into account more than a decade of discoveries in quantum physics, and amodel in which observer participates on a quantum consciousness level in creatin

g reality as we experience it; takes into account discoveries in science which reveal that we live in an open system entropy universe which is expressed througha definitive holo-movement - (Bohm), unfoldingenfolding

Control science based sychological system which perpetuates rigid outer roles, social dysfunctionality; who has the power in the hierarchy? Imposition of authoritarian concepts of emotional and mental health; Dictating the healing process.

Understanding Mind and Behavior

Authentic self in dynamic relations; learning organizations (Senge); Honoring eachpersons inner living process (Schaef); Healing as exploring each persons own process in the context of spiritual growth

Inevitable conflict, Might makes Right; Carrot-Stick systems for control;Justice as reward & punishment;Laws serve those in power

"Politics, Law and Justice"

Partnerships in evolving systems; Soul-expression instead of brute force; Developing individual potential; "Justice" as each one doing whats theirs to do; Laws serve the spectrum of human development on a temporary basis as they are replacedby self-responsibility, conscious focus and evolutionary, growth-oriented intent, individually and as a civilization.

Authoritarian, domination-control institutions: Leviathan solutions; institutionssolve problems; the numbers game; institutions exist to preserve their own existence.

Institutions

Philosophies (maps) make institutions what they are for better or worse; the power of individuals to change institutionsto dance a new dance ; Institutions existon a temporary basis to solve problems, not to serve solutions.

Scarcity focus; economies are out there, bound by impersonal, iron laws; the gameof Monopoly is the model for infinite business expansion, trashing the environment and the population in the process.

Economies

Knowledge & creativity; economies reflect us and the maps we use; we create oureconomies as evolving aspects of society which contribute toward the evolution o


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f both society and the planet as a whole; allows expansion of the idea of "economy" into other levels.

superstition of materialism(Chopra), reductionism, value-free, fact-only view of knowledge, etc.

Reality Model

Spiritual/holographic models; integrated systems including ideas and the dynamics of consciousness itself.

Rethinking Assumptions, Strategies, Responses and Purposes

By Rethinking Our -

Material Mapping

Whole - System Mapping

Assumptions

Economic Reality

Scarcity: "unlimited desires" competing for "limited resources" Re: Monopoly Model, Defunct Malthusian Model

Economic Reality

Know-how and Creativity: Managing creatively what we have and using order to offset scarcity and evolve more efficient ways of doing things

Strategies

Economic Interaction

Maximizing Ownership of Things: Land, Labor, and Capital

Whats Different: Who owns What or Whom

Hoarding Matter

One-Sided Gain (Win-Lose)

Economic Interaction

Developing Systems of Exchange:

Whats common: Knowledge and Creativity

Whats different:How we Develop and Use Knowledge


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which works as a method for breaking through limits & pursuing unlimited possibilities in how we manage our household individually and as a planet.

The Paradigm Web

The Paradigm Conspiracyby Denise Breton and Christopher LargentPaperback - 387 pages1996 ISBN: 1-56838-208-1 (Paper) ISBN: 1-56838-106-9 (Cloth) $13.95Reprint edition (May 1998) ISBN: 1568382081

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A True Prescription for Change

Well, as an individual I was the publisher of The Paradigm Conspiracy, and it remains one of the proudest accomplishments of my professional career. TheParadigm Conspiracy is a brilliant, powerful, and tremendously successful synthesis of what is essentially "wrong" with our culture and its institutions. The authors somehow are able to cast away the ephemera of intellectualism or agenda and simply state what so many of us dared not speak: that there is something essentially wrong here, and that it is only with a completely new vision, accepted with courage, that the wrong can be made right. I am proud to have been one of the champions of this book during my tenure as publisher, and recommend all of Chris and Denise

s books to every reader. Only, only through this type of understanding personally and culturally can our culture advance. Paradigm Conspiracy provides both the understanding and the means for true transformation. Its reading i

s required of each of us.

Dan Odegard, July 29, 1999

Copyright 1988-2011 Leading Edge International Research GroupPage Revised: November 10 2009

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