Paradigm Shifts

With palms together,
Good Afternoon All,

This afternoon I spent an hour and a half at Milagros Cafe sipping green tea and discussing time with my "Great Conversations" co-conspirator, Randy Harris.  As my fellow Zen Teacher, Judy Roitman, pointed out, "It's complicated."

Together we are reading the book, "The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli.  It is a wonderfully challenging text discussing time from a physics perspective. The book challenges our understanding of time, and it is that fact that I deem most important.

Its the challenge in thinking that is of utmost importance. Far too often, it seems to me, we are prone to go with our assumptions and core beliefs, those traits and characteristics we grew up with and believe to be true.

Such beliefs when shared within a population become a "paradigm," a model for understanding a particular thing. Paradigms explain the world around us, often explain our behavior, and certainly guide us if in the darkness of unknowing.  The problem is this: change happens.

Paradigms shift as a result  As new knowledge comes to light a  paradigm expands to include it. At some point in the effort to integrate the change, the paradigm collapses as the new knowledge simply cannot be incorporated. 

Imagine a round hole and a small square peg. As long as the peg remains smaller than the round hole, it will slip into it. Now, lets suppose the square peg begins to become larger.  At some point that peg just will not go in the round hole. What happens?  We must find another hole that will accept the peg. More often than not, some begin to see this development as it occurs and sound the alarm.  The Earth is not flat and is not the center of the universe.

In past posts I have been talking about a paradigmatic shift regarding values. But more precisely its about language and the meanings of values. Robert Pirsig in his masterful work,
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" addresses a dichotomy of values, those considered "classical" and those he considered "romantic." One was more convergent and one more divergent; one was of a scientific bent, the other more artistic. These values clash in some ways, but he thought something, a value, could act as a bridge to bring them together. The was the concept of quality.

I am suggesting that, while this may be so, an underlying problem is that values in all three areas are shifting. It's as though the ground beneath them is collapsing. The words used to identify values are changing so that a word no longer means what we might believe it to mean.  What this may suggest is that, while we believe we are communicating, we are, in fact, not, leading us to ever increasing confict at best and isolation at worst.

In future sections I will attempt to explore the values involved, the shift and potential consequences of this dialectic.  Thank you for reading this introduction.

Yours,

Daiho