The basic paradigm for our cognitive studies of the world we live in is the fundamental law of the Universe, called the Principle of Unity in Panosophy, stating, Wholeness is the union of all opposites. This paradoxical paradigm, which Heraclitus of Ephesus aptly called the Hidden Harmony, denotes a peaceful, both-and way of life, in contrast to the conflict-ridden, either-or approach, which has dominated human affairs during the five or six thousand years of the patriarchal epoch.
Therein lies that greatest challenge of our times. Although the Principle of Unity is all-inclusive, those practicing either-or thinking—emphasizing one side of a pair of opposites, rejecting the other—often see this third space opposite to their one-sided mindsets, and reject the irreversible, universal truth of the Hidden Harmony, creating conflict where there is none.
We see this most clearly in political systems, where extremists of right and left feel threatened by a bipartisan approach to managing our affairs, for the benefit of us all.
We also see the split between opposites in the long-running war between science and spirituality, being fought, for example, between Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow in War of the Worldviews in 2011.
In contrast, when there is no longer a division between East and West in the Cosmic Psyche, experienced individually, we can all recognize that the fundamental Weltanschauung for all our lives is Satchitānanda ‘Bliss of Absolute Truth and Consciousness’.
But this does not mean that Consciousness represents a paradigm change from traditional materialistic views of the Universe, because Consciousness is ultimately indivisible, not a pattern that is repeated with regularity.
Middle English ‘pattern, example, model’, from Late Latin paradigma ‘pattern, example’, from Greek paradeigma ‘pattern, model; precedent, example’, from paradeiknynai ‘exhibit, represent’, literally ‘show side by side’, from para- ‘beside’, from PIE base per-¹, and deiknynai ‘to show’, from PIE base *deik- ‘to show’.
In the traditional grammar of Latin, Greek, and other inflected languages, a paradigm was originally a table of all the inflected forms of a particular verb, noun, or adjective, serving as a model for other words of the same conjugation or declension.
However, following the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, paradigm came to mean ‘theoretical framework, logical or conceptual structure serving as a form of thought within a given area of experience’. Most notably, Kuhn used the terms paradigm change and shift to denote the way that paradigms became transformed during scientific revolutions, such as the heliocentric view of the solar system in the 1500s and 1600s and the oxygen theory of combustion in the 1700s.
As thinkers came to realize that traditional materialistic, mechanistic views of the Universe did fully match human experiences, since the 1970s the hunt has been on for a new paradigm that is suitable to explain what is happening to us all as a species.