Our Current Political Upheaval is part of a much bigger transition – the birthing of a New Paradigm.
We seem to be in a liminal age be poised to take “The Great Leap of Being, ” as Karl Jaspers described it.
Our own period seems very similar to the Axial Age described by Karl Jaspers. As was true then we seem to be living through “a liminal period when old certainties embodied in our institutions of government and religion are losing their credibility– when establishment certainties have lost their validity and, yet, “new ones are still not ready.”
I think – as then – we are on the eve of “a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness.”
Karl Jaspers describes the Axial Age:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age
To understand what this is all transitioning to, we have to understand how unformulated experiences becomes formulated. First there are just general feelings that are largely unconscious. Until those feelings are articulated, they will be acted out. Much of our political activity might be thought of as acting out what is unconscious in us, but is bubbling up to be expressed.
The New Paradigm will be generated by the synthesis of the thought of a variety of thinkers operating in a variety of fields. For out part we must engender an atmosphere where anything can be said. That kind of intersubjective environment is necessary to make the unconscious conscious.
The outlines of a New Paradigm are taking shape:
A new sense of meaning will be generated, a new spirituality, a new way of construing reality.
This new construction of reality will open up new choices for the world.
It will be partly informed by a more pervasive scientific characterized by ongoing questioning. Hypotheses will be formed. They will be tested out with our behavior. Then we’ll look at the evidence of the outcome to either validate or invalidate what we anticipate will happen. Each day’s events will cause us to consolidate some parts of our way of construing life, to revise others, and to relinguish those that don’t work. Humanity will be constantly growing, constantly learning, open to new ways of construing reality based on the evidence.
The world will see ideology for the totalitarianism it is. There will be an awareness reality doesn’t fit into concepts. More and more people will operate with bare attention, seeing what is, rather than identifying reality with their mental representations. There will be an awareness that everything we see occurs in a context of other things which in turn are dependent and conditioned by still other things. Thus everything is joined, interconnected.
More and more people will embrace a nontheistic ethical system similar to Buddhism’s embrace of constant change, where one is not too attached to any idea or belief or ideology, but instead tries to be here and now, open to the constant flux that reality is, resolving to see, to stay aware in this moment, with no gaining intention except to be awake, and to be awake again in the next moment and the next. Elevation of Egoism will be replaced by an awareness of a Whole without intent. Concepts of out there and in here will fade, a realization there isn’t something to go to or away from. Our behavior will follow naturally from what we see, from outcomes, acting out of “full engagement with the moment,” rather than from assumptions in our mind.
We are an electrical- chemical physiological event. First there are emotions streaming from the viscera of our body, the “experiencing me.” Emotions are the signals from the viscera of our body that tell us what has worked from our evolutionary past. It has been said they are like instincts, the tendencies for action that worked in the phylogenic history of the human race for survival. The New Paradigm will involve learning to identify our emotions, becoming sensitive to the feelings in our body that are our reactions to situations in our life. We need to formulate what we feel and then to reflect on it. We get information from two sources, from our own bodies in the form of feelings and from the outside world in the form of sensory information.
The problem in our world is many people behave in an automatic, pre-programmed way by phylogenetic memories and cultural learning. Reason/thinking and emotional regulation can help us to do better. Reflection can help us to restrain our automatic responses. We can stop and think – once we know what we feel – and take account of what we have learned to anticipate outcomes. We not only must be aware of emotional regulation, but also of thought regulation: our thought often comes from families, from culture and is not our own. Thus we must think about our thinking, reflect on our thoughts. Reflection interrupts preprogrammed action, our automatic responses emanating from our primordial memories and from the conditionings we learned in family and culture. We can become acquainted with our introjected selves of family and culture in the form of voices in our head. We need to separate out our introjected voices from our creative intelligence. We do this by reflecting on what goes on in our mind, by reflecting on our thoughts.
The New Paradigm is found in-the-between and is constantly being unfolded. At the heart of the New Paradigm will be the dialogical life in which concepts will be replaced by real listening and real speaking, in which there is newness, the unrepeatable, a realization being is for itself and I can only enter into relationship with it. An ongoing commitment to dialogue will help us get beyond the chaos of our present transitional period.
Many of the problems we are confronted with have to do at their most basic level with separateness and union and identity. These issues are some of the most basic problems of human existence. We cannot assume that people automatically develop their individuality, develop a cohesive self that is separate, yet can relate to others in a spirit of mutuality. There is a relationship between a person’s level of individuation and their ability to see others as separate, different people. We are individuated to the extent we see others as separate and different from us. Individuality is an accomplishment and something our educational system needs to take as one of its aims.
Our Authoritarian Institutions are crumbling and in there place will be people who are their own authorities and who do not act unconsciously on the introjected voices of family.
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