It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)

Analysts often talk about a situation being “highly dynamic.” In other words, the situation is in flux, changing frequently and with the outcome uncertain. Today, that “situation” is the entire planet. No one knows what is coming next and no one knows where we are heading. A common reaction to many of our current crises is, “This shouldn’t be happening. We know better. We learned this lesson before. Systems are in place that ought to be taking care of this. We’re not this stupid or uncaring.” Yet these crises continue and refute our assumed capacities and wisdom.

President Trump’s “bull in a China shop” approach to reforming the federal government is, of course, foolish and cruel, as is his draconian mass arrests of presumed illegal immigrants. But he is getting away with these and other sledge hammer demolitions because the problems he is attacking have been festering for decades without serious attention, let alone resolution. Silicon Valley’s proverbial philosophy of “move fast and break things” may work for new tech startups, but for the government and the country it can only end in disaster.

Similarly, the Middle East has been in crisis for over a century. In the Balfour Declaration (1917), Britain declared its policy to create a Jewish state in Palestine but without regard for the non-Jewish people already living there. To this day, that conundrum has never been resolved, with unending violence and suffering the result. And the region’s conflicts are made all the more complicated by a thread that winds all through it and has, in fact, always been the real issue: control of its oil. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck presciently said that a great war in Europe would be started by “some damn fool thing in the Balkans.” Today, “some damn fool thing” in the Middle East is our concern.

Which brings us to the climate crisis. Again, we have seen this coming for decades (some predicted it over a century ago). To put it simply, the problem as currently formulated is unsolvable. We have been trying to figure out how to ameliorate the environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels while maintaining and continuing to improve our standard of living. It can’t be done. We can’t invent our way out of this but neither will we accept the fundamental change in our way of life that is necessary

This pileup of unsolvable problems is starting to overwhelm us. In recent years, the partisan divide around the world has grown wider and deeper. Political conversation is nearly impossible among people with differing beliefs, even if they are friends or family members. Deep dissatisfaction with political systems is widespread across the Western democracies. Voters seethe because regardless of which party is in power, as the saying goes, the more things change the more they stay the same.

Politicians are cynically dismissed as all being members of a “uniparty,” regardless of their political label. Most of them are heavily subsidized by the wealthy and the corporations they control. Today, the US is routinely described as being more an oligarchy than a democracy. Sensing the dark times ahead, the rich use their power to manipulate the law to preserve and build up their wealth to protect themselves from whatever the future brings.

We now know that over the eons there have been many instances where human beings have become victims of their own success. Tribes and nations have multiplied and prospered while at the same time stripping bare the land around them. Hunger, illness, and starvation followed. Since our planet is large and bountiful, survivors were able to move to new territory and begin again. But not anymore. We have run out of “new territory.” There is no somewhere else to move to.

We are unable to solve these and the countless other problems we face because of the parameters we have set for ourselves. Contemporary free market capitalism’s requirement of unending growth and profit has run up against the limits of material life on this planet. Producing ever more and better is simply unsustainable. It’s been over fifty years since the publication of Limits to Growth (1972). Its warnings about global “overshoot” created much discussion at the time but little action, yet its forecasts have proven to be remarkably accurate.

The values of the market economy are the foundation of our systems, institutions, and even personal identities. Economic freedom means we can create ourselves with our job, car, house, vacations, gadgets, clothes, hair, body, and so on. Whatever improvements we make in these areas are always bigger and better–and more profitable. Thus, our self-worth has become literally measured in dollar signs. “How much did you pay for that?”

Nothing I’ve said here is surprising, original, or new. Concerns about the consequences of science and industry go back at least to Blake’s “dark satanic mills” (1804) and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). My point is that our civilization has painted itself into a corner without a door or window in reach (and no, a rocket to Mars won’t cut it). We may yet move past our immediate crises, but the solutions will always set up the next, and more difficult, crises to follow.

You’re probably familiar with the phrase “paradigm shift,” made famous by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Wikipedia summarizes his idea this way.

Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called “paradigm shifts” … in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed….

During the period of normal science, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher…. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted.

Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms are incommensurable—that is, it is not possible to understand one paradigm through the conceptual framework and terminology of another rival paradigm.

We are today in desperate need of a new paradigm. The “anomalous results” of our current cultural paradigm are piling up all around and threatening to overwhelm us. It isn’t working. We keep trying to find solutions from within our current dysfunctional paradigm without success because it’s the paradigm itself that is the problem. And it can’t solve itself.

Where do new paradigms come from? That was the puzzle Kuhn never solved, and no one else has either, because the answer isn’t found on the side of logic and rationality. Where did Galileo, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein get the inspiration for their paradigms which viewed reality in such new ways they existing theories on their heads? The only explanation is the mystery of creativity, and the courage to follow where it leads.

Any new cultural paradigm will look like nonsense to anyone whose mind is fully captured by our current paradigm. But the continuing dissatisfaction and suffering caused by living in that paradigm can help us become aware within us of a thought, a persistent whisper, a nagging voice, a point of light, nudging us to look for something different.

In the Letter to the Romans, Paul challenges his readers saying, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind.” The Christian idea of “conversion,” which Paul is talking about here, has been much abused and misused. But another ancient term, common to many spiritual traditions, has retained its meaning and value: awakening. Awakening is a transformation which sets us free from our mind where all our constricting paradigms and stories are located.

Daniel Schmidt is a Canadian meditation teacher who believes awakening is the path to the new paradigm our world needs. In a video from his Awaken the World Initiative film series, he says:

Awakening is the answer to all of the world’s problems on every level.

All of the world’s problems stem from a delusion; the fundamental delusion of the mind. That delusion is that I am this limited character. This limited character has a tendency to grasp for what it wants. It’s just a collection of conditioned patterns of craving what it wants or trying to push away what it doesn’t want. It’s this endless process of … going after pleasure, avoiding pain. And if we believe we are in this character, this conditioned pattern, then we suffer.

And we create suffering in the world. The world becomes a reflection of that egoic consciousness. And the world that we are living in now is the natural progression of that egoic consciousness. What we’re seeing around us is nothing but the culmination of egoic activity.,

So, when every individual awakens from their own character, then collectively we become free. When every individual goes through this flip of consciousness—flips from identification with their conditioned character to the true “I”—that flip brings about a freedom from suffering. When each individual dis-identifies from their conditioned character, then they’re no longer acting as an egoic entity, and that brings about a transformation on the planet. This brings a New Earth, a new reality that isn’t an egoic reality.

“A New Earth, a new reality” is what we need but it won’t come out of a research center or political program. Rather, as Schmidt says, it will come about only as, one-by-one, we awaken from the delusion of our egoic self to our true Self, which unites us with everyone and everything. As we change, the world changes. In another video, Schmidt says:

We don’t see things in the world as they are. We see them as we are. When we change ourselves, we change the world we perceive…. The pathless path to liberation for all is for each individual to know themselves and, by awakening to their true nature, to see that true nature in everyone and in all things.

A saying often mis-attributed to Albert Einstein (among others), seems actually to be much more recent. Which make sense since it fits our times so well: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Neither our credit cards nor our bombs will bring about the world of peace and freedom we all seek. Only awakening from our egoic minds, which are addicted to such things, can do that. To our world today, as Paul says, such an idea is “foolishness.” But in fact, such an awakening is nothing less than “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

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