Thoughts from the Edge

The Paradigm of Healing

What keeps us from accepting a new idea?  What stands in the way of us willing to break the rules?  We all have rules and regulations that serve as guidelines in our lives.  Some of those rules are very strongly held.

When I began to consider the power of paradigm shifts, I also began to challenge those closely held rules of my life.  What I discovered was that sometimes I could not solve a problem unless I was willing to go outside the boundaries.  It meant I had to go outside the boundaries of my comfort zone.  I might have to break the rules.

I discovered something very significant about paradigm shifts.

If I changed the rules of my life or established a new perspective about my life, everything went back to zero.

Stepping into a new awareness makes the old paradigm irrelevant.  The old way of functioning is obsolete and there are new ways of "being."

One paradigm shift we are all aware of is that of the shift in thinking from the earth being the center of the universe to the sun becoming the center of our solar system.  The change in thinking took many years for most people to encompass but the way people thought about their existence changed entirely.

The invention of the printing press was the catalyst for another paradigm shift.  The invention of the Internet is another doorway to a paradigm shift.  In every situation nothing was the same as it was before.  All the old rules disappeared and new ones were created.  Everyone who embraced the shift went back to zero.

Most of us have experienced the "God" paradigm.  We have shifted from God out there in the form of an old man with a beard TO the realization that God is within us and God is "energy" and intelligence that is Omnipresent and Omniscient.  When that Paradigm Shift occurs life is never the same.  All of a sudden we realize that if "God" is in me then there is nothing "out there" that can punish me.

We also realize that because God is NOT "out there", then there is no one to blame except ourselves.  And the punishment we end up giving ourselves is sometimes worse than anything we could imagine that God would do to us.  In this whole process we get to start over with our belief system.

Let's look at paradigms of healing.  What I see in our teaching is that there are different ways of recognizing a healing.  It is natural for someone who requests healing to want to return to the way things were before.  We want to heal a wound and have everything "look" normal or reflect a certain standard or ideal.  Well, what IS normal?  And why is it that we believe that returning to the way things were before is a healing?  The event may have occurred because something needed to change.

Our expectations of "wholeness" are often based in a paradigm of physical correctness.  The "rules" of the body are established in a certain way, and if those rules are broken, the body is considered not to be whole.  Christopher Reeves is a whole and perfect being.  But his body doesn't look like everyone else's body.

Our paradigms of healing are simply the boundaries we have in our thinking of "what is possible."  Our paradigms create the filters that prevent us from seeing a possibility.  When we go back to zero, in terms of Spiritual Paradigms, we are right in line with Thomas Troward's great lesson of; "Principle does not depend on precedent."

When we go back to Principle or God, we always go back to zero.  With God all things are possible because there is nothing in the past that can have any affect on the now moment.  God doesn't care about what happened yesterday.  God only knows the perfection of right now.  It is our human memory that establishes a paradigm and keeps us locked in a certain belief system.

In Romans 12:2 there is perhaps the most modern of thoughts.  It represents a paradigm that is incredibly profound:  "And be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind."  All change takes place in the mind.  Every paradigm established has been established in our individual minds.  Perhaps the only escape from paradigms is in the Absolute.

But as Dr. Holmes tells us, it is not practical to enter completely into the Absolute, because as an individual we would not exist.  If we intend to live THIS life in the fullest most wondrous way possible, what we can do is enter into the Absolute to the degree that we are able to transcend the paradigms that keep us stuck.

Every time we use spiritual mind treatment we are challenging a paradigm.  We are shifting our awareness to a place of possibility.  We are establishing "zero-point."  When we no longer believe that the past has power over what happens in the future we are in a new place of conscious awareness.

The only thing we need to remember about paradigms is that once we shift to a new paradigm, as wonderful as it may be, even if you experience great results, there is always still another paradigm.

We constantly evolve and change.  Our paradigms shift as we have those moments of "aha".  All we have to know is that paradigms influence our perceptions.   The great philosopher William Blake said: