Paradigm: [par-uh-dahym, -dim]-- an example serving as a model; pattern.
This word paradigm has other definitions and uses too, but perhaps some synonyms will help: standard; ideal, paragon, touchstone. So when I use the word Paradigm here, I’m talking about a “thought structure”, an ideal way to think of something. It’s not a specific idea, it’s more of a method, a way in which we’re taught to look at the world and solve problems. The main problem with today’s paradigms is that we don’t even realize the fact that they exist. It’s difficult to analyze a paradigm when you are “inside” the paradigm, so let me try and give you an example of a paradigm you are “outside” of…an old paradigm that nobody follows anymore.
The Copernican Revolution involves the collapse of a very well known paradigm. During this time, nearly every scholar and authority figure (like the church) believed the earth was the center of the universe. Why they came up with this in the first place is unknown. These people believed that the Sun orbited the Earth, and so on. It certainly does seem like we are stationary, and the sun moves, but that is not the case. The problem is, when astronomers tried to track the movement of stars and planets they ran into problems. The astronomers couldn’t understand why everything orbited the earth in such a strange fashion. They tried for centuries to give explanations and predict movements, but nothing seemed to work. Do you know what the problem was? It was the paradigm, not the astronomers. Nothing seemed to work because all their calculations were based off the idea that the Earth was fixed. When people proposed maybe the earth actually moves as well, thus influencing our perspective of other things… this was considered outrageous. This was such a difficult concept to accept, that it was called a “revolution”. And that’s where this is leading… to another revolution.
The pre-Copernican astronomers couldn’t predict logical orbits because they never even considered the idea that the Earth itself was in motion. They never thought to analyze the paradigm because they didn’t even realize they were trapped inside it. It seemed so fundamental, basic, and obvious that the Earth was stationary… they never saw any reason to question the concept.
Do you think we have long since broken free of paradigms? Well even today we perceive nearly everything through the filtered lenses called paradigms. The problem is that paradigms are everywhere, and they are so routinely practiced that we don’t even notice we are trapped within them. The biggest problem paradigms present is that they make it extremely difficult to solve complicated problems, and they obscure what is real. When this happens, the only solution is to abandon that paradigm and look at the problem from a new perspective. But how do we determine a paradigm has flaws? It’s very difficult to analyze a paradigm from within a paradigm. It would be difficult to say, “why is the Earth stationary?” if you already have a strong belief that the Earth is in fact stationary. The best way to solve this one is to step outside the paradigm. You must forget the traditional way of looking at things and instead, look strictly at what is real.
“Time”
Our perception of time is actually just a paradigm. The reason we create Paradigms in the first place is because they are helpful. They simplify the “real world” into something we understand. In this way, paradigms can be very useful. An easy example of this is the idea of time zones. Time zones are imaginary lines that simplify reality. We all realize time zones don’t actually divide time. When you cross a time zone, you haven’t actually gone back in time. It would be foolish to actually believe time zones are “real”… so as long as we understand that they are just a useful idea and not a real thing, they can be very helpful.
So that was an example of a simple “time paradigm”, but now let’s look at a less obvious one. We generally view time in three steps: past, present and future. For some reason, we perceive the past as something that is “behind us”, and the future as something that lies before us. I honestly have no idea why we think of it this way. Generally we agree that what we can’t see is “hidden” behind us, and what we can see is laid out in front of us; so why is it opposite when it comes to the idea of time? Why is the future in front of us- when we can’t see the future?
The Ancient Greeks thought of it more accurately. They believed time could be described as a path we walk down. The past is in front of us, and the future is at our backs. To make this paradigm work, think of yourself slowly walking backwards. As times goes on, and we walk backwards, the future is revealed. The past slowly spreads out in front of us, while the future is still behind us…concealed. We can only predict what will happen in the future by looking at what’s in front of us… the past. I know it’s confusing, but most of the confusion is caused by the fact that we are stuck in one paradigm while looking at another. There is nothing wrong with our paradigm. However, because the purpose of a paradigm is to describe what happens in the real world, we could say the Ancient Greek paradigm is more logical, and thus more accurate. Once you realize your paradigm is less efficient than another, there is no good reason to continue teaching and practicing the flawed paradigm. So why haven’t we changed or modified our paradigm? I think most people simply never even ask these questions because they don’t realize they are seeing the world through a paradigm in the first place.
“Duality”
Duality, another paradigm that nobody notices they are practicing. On the surface it appears like it’s such a simple thing… duality, dual, two. But the idea this ultimately represents is almost too vast to really comprehend. It seems the world is full of duality: black and white, up and down, good and evil. But I don’t think this is accurate. To put it simply, in an expression we would recognize, I think opposites are just two sides of the same coin. The key word being “same”. I intend to show that one can’t exist without the other, and if their existence is only relative, then it is not such a “fundamental truth”… assuming “truth” is a term that is not relative. That is, what we call Truth (a true fact) doesn’t vary depending on where we stand, or how we look at it. I know duality seems like a fact. All things have opposites; black is the opposite of white regardless of where the observer stands. This type of reasoning leads us to believe duality is something real… that duality is a fact in itself, but that’s not the case. I think duality is entirely a product of ‘us’ and ‘where we stand’. Duality only exists as a creation of man, not as a “real thing” that exists in nature. A fact is a fact, and a truth should remain true independent of what we have to say about it. To say a fact is only true relative to another fact… and the second one is also dependent on the first, well then we’re going in circles. And circular logic goes nowhere.
The Chinese were among the first people to grasp this concept of duality-as shown in the “Yin Yang”. The Yin Yang has always interested me because it does a great job at representing how two parts belong to one whole. One side is dark, one side is light. When I first began to understand the concept of duality, I was really excited. I felt that I had just discovered one of the big secrets of life… like duality was a big piece of a puzzle. I thought it was a fact of nature, just waiting to be discovered. But it was years later that I began to see how duality had nothing to do with nature. I hadn’t discovered some secret fact, I had just been taught to look at things in a certain way, and label them and classify them. I had learned a “technique” not a fact.
I know this distinction is hard to grasp, and it may seem trivial and unimportant, but where this path takes us is important. It’s not just “dark and light”, or “good and evil”… it’s everything. If you think about duality long enough you will see that things like good and evil are really just products of each other. There is always a balance. They come hand in hand, so that recognizing one inadvertently acknowledges the other. A sort of catch-22. Let’s look at the word beauty. Actually let’s look at the idea of beauty. It doesn’t matter what you call it, ideas exist independently of literal words. So what’s the opposite of beauty? Ugliness. It seems simple enough that one might want to maximize beauty and minimize ugliness throughout the world.
To understand this point, let’s now look at a very simplified version of the world. For this example let’s just say there is only one person in the entire world. It seems to be in our nature to immediately begin classifying and naming things. But this is not something that exists in nature itself. Classifications are something that man brings with him. So as this person begins to think and observe things let’s just say he sees a field of flowers. If the man sees a bright and colorful flower he may apply the idea of “beauty” to it. In contrast, if he sees a dead rotting flower he may feel something we call “ugliness”. This is obvious. But the important thing to understand is that ugliness wasn’t invented when the man saw the rotting flower. No, ugliness was invented the moment the man saw the colorful flower and thought of beauty. To acknowledge something is beautiful is to immediately draw a line and begin dividing things. With the birth of an idea like beauty, there is already ugliness. What was once uniform and indifferent has now been divided. All in just one instant. To say something is beautiful is to imply that it is more beautiful than other things. Without looking for ugliness, we have found it. Maybe “found” isn’t a good word… because it didn’t exist in nature as a fact waiting to be discovered. Instead of “found” I’d like to say “created”. That’s better. By calling something beautiful, we have created ugliness. We intended simply to call something beautiful to our attention, but we accidently brought ugliness into the world too. I said ugliness didn’t exist in nature until our person created it because nature doesn’t make these distinctions. Yes, the too flowers were not the same… but that doesn’t mean one was beautiful and one was ugly. A flower doesn’t think of itself as good or bad, pretty or ugly. It just is. “It is what it is”. It’s so simple it’s almost hard to understand.
I think this entire topic seems so strange because of our culture. For as long as we can remember we were taught to think of things in terms of classes, subdivisions, and opposites. I think these things were brought to our attention at such a young age that we didn’t even realize where the ideas came from. Our culture never thought us that opposites are a creation of man. Opposites were taught as if they were a fact of life, something that existed in the world. It sounds crazy to say up and down weren’t always opposites. If I told you that this was a product of our imagination you would call me crazy. But in nature, up and down don’t even exist. This is just another creation of man, taught to us as if it was a fact waiting to be discovered. I’m not saying that these classifications are a bad thing, in fact they do a wonderful job at simplifying our understanding of the world. It would be hard to communicate with other people without words like up and down, or good and bad. But I think it is important to realize what things are real, and what things are conjured up in our heads… regardless of how useful they are.
Think of it this way: having an imaginary friend isn’t really a bad thing, so long as you realize it’s just imaginary. When people are no longer able to differentiate products of their imagination with what is real, well then we call them insane, crazy. I think we don’t realize paradigms are products of our imagination, in the same way that crazy people don’t realize imaginary friends are products of theirs. So if it’s ok to have an imagination, but it’s crazy to confuse it with reality… well then maybe we’re all a little crazy.
(Wu Wei)
Is it ridiculous to say there are things that can’t be described by words? No matter how many words you use, or in what order you put them, there are some things that just can’t be defined. I think we actually see many examples of indescribable ideas all the time. Imagine trying to tell a blind person what colors look like. If you’ve already witnessed colors it doesn’t seem so hard. But there are some things that you must come to know on your own. You can’t simply read about them and fully understand them. This leads me to my next point, which is a hard one to define. We actually don’t even have a word for it in English, so I’m going to borrow a Chinese word: Wu Wei.
Wu Wei is a term for where beauty and ugliness come from. It’s how they relate and why they exist together. Wu Wei is actually a term for the root of where all things come from, good/evil, black/white, etc. This is one of those things that is difficult to describe if you haven’t experienced it yourself… so let me try to give you an example: If beauty and ugliness come hand in hand, we could say they are two sides of the same coin. We can never really get rid of beauty without also getting rid of ugliness; just like you can’t get rid of one side of a coin… it’s a paradox. Well if the opposites are two sides of a coin, then Wu Wei is the coin. Does that make sense? Wu Wei is what came before man started labeling things. Wu Wei simply means: something is what it is. I don’t like defining it this way, because it seems so unimportant. “It is what it is” what’s that supposed to mean anyway? Ok, so “it is”. Big deal. But it is a big deal. If you look hard enough you will begin to see what is real, and what is a product of our imagination. As we’ve said, products of our imagination aren’t a bad thing… they just should not be confused with what is real. If you want to know the Truth, I would suggest you start looking at what is real.
I guess the biggest conclusions that can be drawn about opposites are that they come hand in hand. You can’t get rid of one and keep the other. They have a natural way of balancing themselves out, and they always seem to exist in harmony. Thus, when people want to rid the world of evil… they usually don’t want to also rid the world of good. What we have just discussed demonstrates why these things must exist hand in hand. One can’t exist without the other. To accept this is to accept the idea that as long as there is good, there will always be evil. Maybe this idea of “ridding” the world of anything is just the wrong approach. Good and evil technically don’t even exist in nature. It’s a product of your imagination. It’s not a bad product… but confusing this “idea” with an actual thing that exists is where the problem starts. Nature doesn’t strive to meet your goals and imaginary ideas, nature is simply Wu Wei. It is what it is. It’s what is real. So don’t get frustrated when your imagination and what’s real fail to meet. At the same time however, don’t say “oh well, doing evil is in some vague way like doing good… so I’ll just do evil”. To draw this conclusion is to misunderstand the concept of Wu Wei entirely.
