What starts out as a new paradigm becomes, for most people, the new normal fairly soon.

Paradigms open some new horizons but they also close others. That’s how they work: by validating some behavior but warning against others.

And it’s this development that can turn a paradigm from inspirational to limiting. It ceases being a guardian and becomes a guard.

For that reason, it makes sense to be aware of the paradigms we accept and always to question our paradigms as well as our behavior.

That doesn’t make a new paradigm necessarily deficient. What makes it deficient is that we turn it from something three-dimensional into something flat, from a living context to a dead set of rules.

So we’re not necessarily out of woods even if we’ve glimpsed the new paradigm and entered into the new world. We have to watch that we don’t fall asleep in that world and make the paradigm into a source of drama or a dream.

This seems to be what’s meant by eating the menu instead of the meal or looking at the map instead of the territory.

Self-mastery is a real goal and a worthy one, but I could easily turn it into just another “should.”

***

So with that proviso, I begin surveying this new land.

What is it about creative expression that has made it mostly outlive its usefulness for me? Well, for one thing, it doesn’t take into account dealing with higher-dimensional beings.

One thing that scuttled the Neptune trip (besides my mismanagement) was that our vibrations were so low that the galactics would have had a hard time being with us. We were unruly. We were gripped by strong emotions. Some of our ways of being (like anger) show up for them like choking fumes.

There were other reasons of course, but this was one large consideration.

If we want to deal with the galactics, I think we have to have our thoughts and emotions under control.

Of course our thoughts and emotions are visible to them. If we come on board a ship and run riot with our thoughts and emotions, the galactics see it all.

Creative expression worked well to get us out of our limiting suppression. It had its time and place. But now we have bigger goals to pursue and we need a paradigm that helps us to achieve them, I think.

I’m not sure that we can master the parts of ourselves that do damage to others as long as many major vasanas and false grids remain. We’ve been working on cleansing ourselves and releasing our baggage for some years now and I’m led to believe that we’ve made much progress.

Creative expression of a less boisterous kind may still be needed to move through some of the remaining barriers to just being here.

But many of us have risen to a level where the rough-and-ready expression of our feelings from yesteryear now hurts and isn’t easily tolerated. We need to tone it down, in my opinion. (And no one needs to tone it down more than me, so I’m not leaving myself out of this.)

There are people I know who’ve reached an incredible lightness of being, an incredible blitheness. And it inhibits their progress for the rest of us to be “expressing ourselves” as freely as we once did.

We have to avoid the trap of lapsing again into suppression and that’s the part of the new paradigm that I feel least educated in.

How do we avoid simply shutting down and eating all our responses to things, as we did back in the Fifties? How do we allow our own genuineness and authenticity but without harming others? I consider that the major challenge of the weeks and months ahead.

We’re all of us Christopher Columbuses on this next leg of the journey. When we enter a new dimension as a collective, there aren’t shared resources to fall back on. On many days it feels like we’re making it up as we go along.

OK, let me stop here. I’m still gazing into this new land and haven’t really set foot on it. I’m not sure how to progress, quite frankly. Its rules are not known to me. I may begin to research the subject as a way of establishing a beachhead of understanding.