Skip to main content

Paradigm shift




Paradigm shift, in simple words, is a change from one way of thinking to another. For example, we can think of religion as compassion instead of a set of rituals and prayers. A paradigm shift can bring about miraculous changes in our life. A prisoner, for instance, will make his life miserable if he despairs of his condition or can make his term a happy period if he chooses to do something creative under the given conditions. Aren’t we all prisoners in this world?

Awareness is a necessary prerequisite to all meaningful changes. One plain truth is that we love to live in our comfort zone. Only when we become aware of facts like our comfort zone is not the best of zones available and that there are many other better possibilities and options open to us, will we be able to change.

In the beginning of his novel, Illusions, Richard Bach tells a story about some water creatures. These creatures spend their entire lifetime clinging to the rocks and twigs at the bottom of the crystal clear river. One day they see another creature like themselves floating on the water above them. They think that creature is going to be their messiah since he is performing what they perceive as a miracle. They beg the messiah to save them. The floating creature tells them that he is no messiah and that if they want to save themselves they should let go their clinging. The creatures cannot imagine letting go. All their life they have been clinging. Clinging was the way of life for their ancestors, it is theirs as will be their future generations’.

They refused to let go and continued to cling. Maybe they made up imaginative stories about a messiah who made an apparition to them once upon a time. Maybe they made a religion in the name of that messiah, created rituals, composed prayers. And continued to cling.

Letting go is the paradigm shift. Can we let go some of our silly prejudices? Can we let go some of our attitudes to success, wealth, and whatever else we think is very important? Can we open our minds, our consciousness, to new truths which are waiting to reveal themselves to us?

Are you ready for the paradigm shift?

PS. For #BlogchatterA2Z

Comments

  1. Anita SabatApril 19, 2018 at 2:30 PM

    I have read the book. It's great.
    I agree with you. Unless we leave clinging, we cannot go up or fly or float!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
35 comments
Read more

Zorba’s Wisdom

Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek . I fell in love with Zorba the very first time I read the novel. That must have been in my late 20s. I read the novel again after many years. And again a few years ago. I loved listening to Zorba play his santuri . I danced with him on the Cretan beaches. I loved the devil inside Zorba. I called that devil Tomichan. Zorba tells us the story of a monk who lived on Mount Athos. Father Lavrentio. This monk believed that a devil named Hodja resided in him making him do all wrong things. Hodja wants to eat meet on Good Friday, Hodja wants to sleep with a woman, Hodja wants to kill the Abbot… The monk put the blame for all his evil thoughts and deeds on Hodja. “I’ve a kind of devil inside me, too, boss, and I call him Zorba!” Zorba says. I met my devil in Zorba. And I learnt to call it Tomichan. I was as passionate as Zorba was. I enjoyed life exuberantly. As much as I was allowed to, at least. The plain truth is
19 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
12 comments
Read more

Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha
8 comments
Read more