Personal Paradigms

In Lynne's books she talks about beliefs being vital to all success in intentions. I have found this to be very true in my experiences. I have found the performance and effect of my intentions are directly in relationship to my beliefs. When you have set out with a strong intention with a lot of belief and power and within a week it has withered away, it is due to the initial belief withering away and returning to a dis-empowered paradigm.

Our paradigm is our perception or mental map of reality. For our mind to make sense of what our senses are telling us about the external world, the mind must make a mental map to relate to. This mental map is usually referred to as our personal paradigm. The brain makes stimulus responses and automatic patterns to the events in our day to day lives. This unconscious act is the blueprint or mental map of which our attitude or behaviors arrive from.

From your first day as a baby you started to create and develop your map of reality. The map entails what things mean and what you should do in reaction. You experienced things and made judgments on whether something was safe or not. Babies have a fresh and new map of reality and that is why they are so curious. Curiosity is the instinct to develop your map of reality. So babies go ahead and do things that are potentially dangerous. Until they realize that doing some things mean pain an other things mean pleasure they will venture to find out. For example; if every time a baby touched the radiator and experienced pain from the heat, they would associate the radiator to pain. If the baby really enjoys fruit every time they eat it, the baby will associate pleasure to fruit. So the baby has a more developed map of what means pain and what means pleasure. Human instinct is always to go towards some kind of emotion that is pleasurable. Emotions that could come from comfort, peace, intimacy, significance, or contribution. This could be someone's idea of pleasurable emotions, but they could be very difference to someone else. Someone else could value the emotions that come from adventure, passion, romance, and creativity. These values are learned from pain-pleasure experiences the person has gone through. The same is for negative emotions. People have emotions they avoid at any cost. This drive to avoid negative or painful emotions is more dominant than the valued pleasurable emotions. This is due to human instinct. This is what causes behavioral complexes.

Our paradigm of the world is subjective due to the vast experiences that have shaped it. Your sensory experience of the world is also subjective. Our world is really not what we think it is through our senses. Your experience of the world is a thought based hologram your subconscious has produced from the electronic signals from your senses. So what you are experiencing right now is the product of your senses - not the product of objective reality. Light, sound, taste, smell, and touch are the five subjective interpretations that are best for our human experience to navigate around the world. In actual reality there is no such thing as light, or sound. They only exist in the mind of the observer. George Berkeley the Irish philosopher and his famous riddle expresses this concept well. "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" My first answer to that was "yes, because when a tree falls it causes a lot of kinetic energy which vibrates through the forest and that is called sound. So it does make a sound." What I didn't realize is that sound a sensory experience of an observer and if the observer is not present then when the tree falls there is no sound to be produced in the mind of the observer. There is only kinetic energy in reality. With no observer in the forest the tree will fall silently. Reality is a senseless world. Our experience makes it a sensory one.

What this means for us is that our paradigms of the world are not objective but rather very subjective. This is great because it means we can see reality as a beautiful one if we had a map that supported that. Because of cultural conditioning this is not common. People's paradigms are based on avoiding pain. Western cultural conformity supplies a level of comfort that many people settle for because it means being safe from pain. This is the paradox of our western lives because we want to experience more and to see the world as a mysterious, magical, and beautiful place (well.... those are my values) but the comfortable life keeps you from taking the risk to go outside the comfort zone.

In order to improve the quality of your life and the people's around you - you must change the blueprint of your mind - your personal paradigm. Remember your paradigm is your map of reality and your map of reality determines the way you perceive and react to reality. The way Stephen Covey explains it;

"The most common way to understand paradigms is to see them as maps. We know that the map is not the territory. A map is simply just an explanation of aspects of the territory. That is exactly what a paradigm is - it's a theory, an explanation, or a model of something else. For instance if you wanted to arrive somewhere is central Chicago, a street map of the city would be a great help to you in reaching your destination. But suppose you were given the wrong map. Through a printing error the map labeled Chicago was actually a map of Detroit. Can you imagine the frustration, the ineffectiveness of trying to arrive at your destination? You might try to work on your behavior, you would try harder, you would be more diligent, you'll double your speed but your efforts will only succeed in getting you to the wrong place faster. You might even work on your attitude, you might think more positively. You still wouldn't get to the right place but perhaps you wouldn't care. Your attitude would be so positive you would be happy and contented wherever you were. The point is you'll still be lost."

So what is your mental map of reality made of? It is made of beliefs and values that come from your past experiences and judgments. Your beliefs can empower or dis-empower your intentions. If you set your intention to lower the crime rate by 30% (increase peace by 30%) in your community but you don't believe in the power of intention, then it is very unlikely you will be very effective. So your intentions have requirements on the behalf of your belief system. Your effectiveness of intention is dependent on your level of belief that intention works and you are doing it right.