In The Begining

We are in the midst of a revolution-one of the most important in world history. We are currently living through a deep, broad and profound transformation of Western culture. What is being transformed are our most basic ideas about reality-and that is why it's so profound, so revolutionary. For a revolution in thought is a revolution in ev erything: everything that can be thought about, everything that can be understood, everything that can be wondered about, guessed at, imagined, or dreamt of.

All disciplines, areas of knowledge, institutions, compartments of culture are experiencing this dramatic change.

A revolution implies a turning-a turning away from something and a turning to something. What is being turned away from, and turned to, is a basic set of assumptions about the world-a belief sytem.

All societies, in every age, have a belief system that explains and defines the world for them. It gives them the rules for interpreting and interacting with the world, and colors their experience of it.It tells them how to think and speak, and what to think and speak about.It tells them how to be and what to do.

Huston Smith has likened such a belief system, or world view, to a pair of glasses worn on the end of the nose. After a while we forg et they are there, yet they constantly adjust and focus our view-they condition and refract everthing we see.

We are now in the process of changing our spectacles, of acquiring a new way of looking and a new way of seeing. And what we see is a new world with a new set of rules.

Everything we see is different: our logic and values, our science and religion, our art, math, literature, music,philosophy, businesses, governments, schools, communities, families and perhaps most importantly of all- ourselves.

We will examine two world views and describe their far reaching effects on our culture and our personal lives. First we'll consider the paradigm we inherited from the founders of modern science, which has dominated western civilization for over three centuries. Then we'll consider the new view which in this century has begun to supplant it.

We will look at the problems solved by each view and the problems each can cause, the questions answered, and the new questions raised. For world views are born for this very reason- to solve a new set of problems, and provide a new set of answers: problems created by the worldview that is dying, and answers that were beyond its grasp, its time, and its purpose.

This is not to say that in its time the passing view didn't serve us well, for it had a brilliant career. But it was never meant to last forever, and as the poet says,"time moves forward not backward, and doesn't tarry with yesterday".

Each passing brings a new birth, and worldviews are born to renew a dying world-to replace a senescent civilization. With new birth comes new possibilities and new hope, a renewed purpose and a deeper meaning.

For paradigm change is ultimately about the search for meaning. It allows a culture to grow and adapt to its own growth. To recast old meaning in new forms to connect the present with the past, and open the door to the future. This is the way we root ourselves, and catch up with history, catch up with a world that has turned under our feet. For things change! And a paradigm shift is a way of understanding and processesing that change.

It is, after all, the search for meaning that gives rise belief ystems.
This innate drive for belonging, to be rooted in, or linked to
this world is the most basic human need. This drive is the foundation of civilization. Religion comes from re ligio, to link back, and it's in the religious quest the search for our origins and our originator, the search to answer the most basic questions of human existence that belief systems are born.

Belief systems have an origin. They are grounded in the most fundamental ideas of a culture. It should not be surprising then to find that they are based on the most fundamental idea of all-that of a Creator. Ideas about God-or Ultimate Reality-become the archetypes on which we model the rest of our thought.

Our thoughts about the Creator, and His relation to the creation, determine how we think of everything else.

These fundamental ideas are dramatically expressed in the creation stories of any culture. For this is where we see the Creator in action and learn of his nature. Later these same ideas will turn up 'everywhere'-in formal systems of thought, as the guiding principles of our most "sacred" institutions, and in our common language and commom sense. They permeate our lives. But there origin goes back to the creation stories, back to the origin of all things, back to the beginning.