It
has been said that everything happening around us calls up life’s potential
within us, and when we align with our Infinite
Pure Conscious Mind, which is eternal, universal and outside our finite conscious
awareness, we align with its pure potentiality and are able to create truly
unique and appropriate responses to the impermanence of our lives. Throughout
history, disruptions in our taken-for-granted ways of thinking and acting have
caused seismic shifts in our ideas about truth and reality. Thomas Kuhn (1962)
called these disruptions “paradigm shifts” and their uniqueness lies in the
fact that once they happen nothing remains the same. More importantly, as
Einstein said, they cannot be solved by the same thinking that caused them. When
we attempt to do so, we make things worse and allow them to gather energy so
insidiously that it’s hard to locate their original cause and impossible to
reverse their effect. So if we can’t solve problems with the same thinking we used
to create them, how do we solve them? Before answering this question, it may be
worth exploring exactly what we mean by disruptive change.
The insidious nature of disruptive change
is best explained using the lens
offered by George Land who, in 1973, proposed a unifying theory of
transformation in his book Grow or Die. According to Land, all things grow and
develop in a four-phase pattern: gather,
repeat, share and transform. For
example, babies move through the gather
phase by taking in nourishment and growing in size. This stage is marked by
growth of sameness, simply getting larger without changing form. Once the first
stage is complete the second stage can begin. In the repeat phase, teenagers grow by influencing their peers to be like
them. Growth is achieved by replicating one’s likeness in a given subculture. Children
do this when they join with their peers to dress or talk in like manner. According
to Land, groups that form around self-similarity are replicating themselves and
are in the second phase of growth. The third phase, share is the most mature stage. This is when adults mutually grow
through reciprocal interaction and form a larger whole, whether in a
corporation, community or family. In the repeat phase, the important message
from Land is that we grow by maximizing sameness, but in the share phase, we
grow by maximizing differences, so that a higher social order or social system
might thrive, giving way to transformation in phase 4, which, by its very
nature, succeeds and encompasses the former system.
All phases
leading to the transformation share one thing in common, they are transitions,
not transformations. This is an important distinction because transitions
usually do respond to thinking and acting within the rules of the predominant paradigm.
They don’t necessarily spell disaster, but if disaster is to be averted and a
threat transformed into an opportunity, it is necessary to challenge the belief
that we have life figured out and become adept at questioning and changing the
patterns of the predominant paradigm. At no time in our history has this been
more possible than in our present paradigm the age of information and
knowledge. Through powerful computing and networking technology, we are able to
exchange information in the shape of thoughts and ideas faster than any
generation that has gone before.
So in answering
the question of how to solve
complex problems with higher quality of thinking, we can see that this internet
enabled technology allows us to
communicate information in ways that shape consciousness by bringing forth new
worlds. These worlds establish pervasive and distinctive ways in which things,
people and selves appear and make sense. Like the ‘Fibonacci sequence’ the
power of these reciprocal interactions is a kind of explosion of emergent
creativity driven by people with a passion to pursue those challenges they care
most about and which, when solved, make life worth living for themselves and
society at large. They also share a willingness to gain power by giving it away.
The driving
force of the age of consciousness is Infinite Pure Consciousness naturally
seeking awakened opportunity. Indeed, it may well be an evolving expression of
a universe in the process of awakening to itself. According to the Buddha, this
impulse to awaken is inherent in all manifestations – it’s all “Buddha nature.”
The universe’s potential for awakening can be understood by consciousness – the
most highly evolved expression of our universe’s energy
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