(Continued from Part 2.)
Going Beyond Creative Expression
I needed to source the vasana while at the same time getting the underlying message about my communicational frame of reference. It was a two-stage process and I went back and forth with it.
I was maximally confused. And I stayed religiously away from people while I navigated it.
I didn’t navigate it alone. I had very competent help.
And now I’m left with the incidental discovery that my very paradigm of communication played a role in keeping me from seeing what I needed to see. My paradigm defined how I saw things. It limited my understanding. It was itself skewed.
As a result of my breakthrough into a new paradigm, a new world as it actually seems, I could see that the paradigm of “creative expression” may not come with us into the future. Parts of it may survive, because they’re useful, but other parts may not.
The bar seems higher now. The bar, the paradigm of the future, appears now to be self-mastery and that takes things in an entirely new direction.
I feel like a fish having come up on dry land, I’m taking baby steps in this strange and new environment. I may as well be walking on the moon as be inside this new paradigm.
As a stranger in a strange land, I don’t know a thing about the paradigm. I want to ask someone where the washrooms are. But I agree that the paradigm is a good thing.
It isn’t the final step. No paradigm is. Every paradigm offers comfort for a while and then, as we expand more, begins to pinch somewhere.
All paradigms are sooner or later superseded, as far as I know. They’re all thought-born and that alone ensures that they will be overtaken.2
As each hour passed, the import and impact of this particular discovery spread through me and my amazement grew.
I may have reached here by stumbling into the Labrea tar pits (vasanas), but I got here, and not a minute too soon.
Being in quest of self-mastery, even if it means being the newest newbie on the block, is infinitely better than being in quest of creative expression.
Even the first minute of it, the first breath of it is invigorating. It’s like being in a bigger room, a bigger house, compared to the old paradigm.
I get to see how any paradigm can be confining.
If this is not an example of paradigmatic breakthrough on the hoof, I don’t know what is. I’ve shifted from the old paradigm of creative expression to the new paradigm of self-mastery.
Ever since, I’ve been seeing things about self-mastery. It’s causing, not a creative explosion perhaps, but a building bonfire.
I get to see how much rides on me mastering my own thoughts and feelings. I get to see what vistas open up if I can get beyond creative expression to self-mastery.
I don’t know where to turn next. I’m like a kid in a candy shop only there’s nothing in the shop yet.
So let me stop here. I hope I’ve illustrated the process of paradigmatic breakthrough. I thank the friend who helped me through this situation, who assisted me to source my vasana and who listened to me as one paradigm collapsed and another arose.
I’ll probably need a day or two to rest and make sense of where I’ve arrived.
Now off to walk on the moon, all alone out here, taking baby steps into a whole new world.
In the last section I’d like to look at lessons learned and make some suggestions for others going through the same process of paradigmatic breakdown and breakthrough.
(Concluded in Part 4.)