The New Paradigm
vol. II, Number 13

Dear Friends,

Earlier on (tnp vol. II #1, 12/5/98) I said I wanted to consider the topic of "Education" during the coming year; and now as the tragic massacre at Littleton, Colorado this past April 20 is being replaced in the "collective consciousness" by fresher tragedies, and/or trivialities, this may be as good a time as any to do it.

It is not particularly probable, but it is at least possible that what follows may find its way into the hands of some of the parents who lost their children at Columbine High School. If so I would like to add my condolances to the many you have already received. I share your grief and outrage, for in a very real sense your children are my children, and what happened at Columbine could have happened at any school in any town in any state or province in North America, or possibly the world. Like you I love my children, and so can well imagine the grief, anguish, resentment, bewilderment and complex mixture of other emotions that must acompany frequent thoughts of your children who are no longer part of your households.

If I may, I would like to share with you a thought about "death" (so-called) which seems like such a final, irrevokable "end" to all of us who have experienced it only at second hand. People we love, who were once part of our lives, are no longer to be found "anywhere." They're simply "not here any more;" "gone;" "passed on;" "dead." So it seems. Yet at bottom, I don't think anybody really believes that; I certainly don't believe it. It doesn't make any sense at all to me. How can anything or anybody that was once alive possibly ever be "dead?" Or to put it another way, how can anything or anybody that exists ever possibly "non-exist?" Life or existence are certainly inexplicable mysteries - at least to me, and I've never heard them satisfactorily explained by anybody else; yet they are undeniable and irrefutable Cosmic facts: the Facts of Life. You, and I, and our children, friends, family, acquaintences... exist: mystriously, inexplicably, yet with utter certainty. This we know and cannot deny, no matter what else we may "know" or "not know." Each of us knows, whether consciously or not, that we exist; "I AM." And being, living, existing, we can never possibly "not be." Such a supposed "condition" is utterly inconceivable, unimaginable, incomprehensible, and impossible. Think about it for a "moment," or a "year," or a "lifetime." Can you deny it?

Therefore it is a Cosmic Fact of Life that nobody "died" at Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, U.S.A., April 20, 1999. Nobody. Something happened, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with "death;" because "death" is a Cosmic impossibility, a "contradiciton" of the Facts of Life, which are utterly without the possibility of contradiction. Your children are safe, and healthy, and happy, and alive, right now. Moreover, they have done what they came here to do; they accomplished their mission, heroically, purposely, victoriously, gloriously. They participated in one of the numberless dramas which take place on this Planet at all times. They took their cues, played their parts flawlessly, and exited center stage, having captured the attention, at least for a moment, of the entire world; certainly the entire continent of North America. And now they are moving on to their next adventures in the endless, limitless realms of existence. They deserve a standing ovation, the Cosmic equivalent of an Oscar, an Academy Award! And I am sure they are receiving their well-deserved praise, "even as we speak."

Meanwhile, they have left behind the stunned audience who witnessed their outstanding performance, who are grappling with the issues raised by their flawless production. Parents, Teachers, Students, Children, Adults, Photographers, Writers, Producers, Police, Clergy, School Board Members, Mayors, Governors, Congresspersons, Parliamentarians, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Citizens, ...ask ourselves, and one another, "Why?" "What was that all about?" "How could such a thing have happened?" "What can we do about it?" "Who's fault is it?" "Why?" "Why?" "Why?"

Good questions all, and I imagine each of us must ultimately come up with our own answers to the specific questions each of us considers most important. I'm going to venture some of my own thoughts here, as always with the understanding that they are no more nor less than the opinions of a single individual, offered in Love and Light to any who may resonate with them. To any who may not, my recommendation is that you simply ignore them.

The first thought that comes into my mind as I contemplate Columbine High School, April 20, 1999, is that two boys, who evidently were raised in good, solid, prosperous, conventional families, had developed a profound anger about something, which they directed with persevering deliberation explicitly and intentionally against their School, Teachers and fellow Students. Their anger was not a casual matter; it was an "anger unto 'death'," deliberately "suicidal." They had evidently reached a state of mind in which they no longer wished to participate in life upon this Planet; but they wanted to make their exit as spectacular, as attention-getting as they could manage; which they indeed accomplished with unblemished success. They made a statement which they considered of greater importance than their own, or anybody else's, lives.

This is something that bears pondering. It doesn't happen very often, yet it is not without precedent. It reminds me of another memorable performance staged by the Venerable Thich Quang Duc, who on 11 June 1963, with the assistance of fellow Buddhist monks, drenched himself with gasoline and deliberately set himself ablaze at a busy downtown intersection in the city then known as Saigon, Viet Nam. The Ngo Dinh Diem regime against which Duc's protest was aimed had not then five months left before it too went down in flames. Such events do not happen without reason, and those who ignore them or dismiss them as irrelevant do so at their peril. Peril, that is, of seeing them repeated, or worse.

Surely there is nothing about Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado that insists such a horrendous event be staged there and nowhere else? One never knows, but I submit the Columbine Massacre could have happened anywhere, and may be repeated anywhere, at least in North America. I see it as a signal, a "wake-up call." All is not well with American education; all is not well with American youth; all is not well with "conventional communities;" with the "American way of life" that is emulated in many ways all over the world. Many people doubtless would like to find reasons to believe it was just a "freak occurrence;" "somebody else's tragedy." Fifteen people died at school one day in a nation of what? 260 million? In a world of six thousand million? It's not "statistically significant."

Maybe not, but it's significant to the Parents, Teachers, Friends and Families on the spot; and that, my Friends, means You and Me, not "somebody else." There is no refuge to be taken in "It can't happen here." It did happen "here," and until and unless some fundamental changes are made in the hearts and minds that, individual by individual, make up the conceptual fiction we label "society," or "my country," or "humanity," things like this will continue to happen with increasing frequency... until such necessary changes are made.

So what are these so-called "necessary changes?" Actually, only one change is "necessary;" but it "must" occur spontaneously and by free, uncoerced choice in the heart and mind and soul of each individual. It is a simple (and therein lies the difficulty, or part of it) change of perception: a change from perceiving "reality" as a collection of separate beings and "things" to perceiving Reality as a single Totality, a united One-ness. It is a change from the predominant and predominating mood of "fight / flight" among Human Beings to one of "Love and Light;" from "us vs. them," "me vs. you," "kill or be killed," "take it or lose it;" to one of "we are all One;" "I love you;" "peace, Brother / Sister." It is a change from fear to Love. It is a change from what I like to call the "old paradigm" to the "new paradigm" - realizing all the while that the "new paradigm" isn't new at all, but is older than the "foundation of the universe."

Can you imagine what the world would be like if this one simple change were actually to take place within the hearts and minds of even a small majority of the Human population of the Planet? Can you imagine what it would be like if it were to spread to an overwhelming majority? Can you think of a single Human problem, anywhere, under any circumstances, that could persist in such a world? In such a world, would we all not be living literally in "Heaven on Earth?" Do you think such a world is possible?

I do. I think it is not only possible, but inevitable; because I think at bottom that is what the Totality, the One-ness, and each one of us individually, is; our evident blemishes and warts notwithstanding. I think so because I cannot comprehend how any of us, or anything at all, could possibly be, were we ourselves, each individually, and the Totality of All That Is, anything less than sublimely perfect. Oh, there's plenty abut us, and each other, we may jolly well not like; but none of that is "cast in stone," so to speak. It's not unchangeable. There's nothing we "don't like" we cannot change, transmute into something else we do like very much - that we love. This is so because there is nothing about ourselves we cannot change, if we really want to, each one of us individually; and since we are ultimately not "many," but One, there is nothing in the entire "length and breadth of the universe" that does not reside within us - within "Me" - and is not accessible to "My" purposeful will to change. Can You believe that?

It's a matter of "Education:" a word that means a lot of different things, maybe, to a lot of different people. To me, education is not the exclusive domain of an institution such as, say, Columbine High School. Education for any Human resident of planet Earth commences - well, in a limited sense, inside the womb, before one is even born; and it doesn't cease, even with the last breath of bodily life. In a larger sense our education is not delimited at all by the "mileposts" of "birth" and "death;" because there is no "birth" or "death." There just simply is. Throughout our Cosmic existence, which has no beginning and no end, we are ceaselessly pursuing our education through the endless, and endlessly variable, experience of who and what we are. There is no experience in this world or any other which does not make some positive contribution to our unending Cosmic education. Some of our experiences are not to our liking, and we do not wish to repeat them; others are very much to our liking, and we seek to repeat them as often as we can, or as often as we want to before we tire of them and seek other experiences. We are gluttons for experience - all experience, any experience.

As a race of Human Beings on planet Earth, though, we are yet very young and primitive, and have not acquired the discernment that comes with... well, with experience. For although our being has no beginning and no end, our decision to come here to planet Earth at this "time" included a decision to temporarily wipe our memory clean of our beginningless prior experience: so we could have the experience of starting fresh, discovering who and what we are all over again. But we haven't been doing it very long (only a few tens of thousands of years in our present biological form - hardly an "instant"), and so understandably, we're rather awkward at it. So we're educating ourselves, and one another, in a fresh course of experience.

An experience like Columbine High School, 20 April 1999, is a message from ourselves, to ourselves, that the course of experience we have been pursuing there, and in similar families, institutions, communities, nations, "everywhere," "is not to our liking." Somebody - several somebodies, "perpetrators" and "victims" alike, who speak for multitudes - have said with deliberate and purposeful intensity: "I'd rather be 'dead' than 'live' like this!" Bang! Want to hear it again? Stand by. Or shift paradigms. The "old paradigm" doesn't work!

That's the message I heard, with crystal clarity, 20 April, from Columbine High School; and now I hear echoes ricocheting from Georgia, while "elected leaders" (so called) rush to betray their oaths of office by leaping upon the momentary opportunity to further incrementally disarm a population guaranteed a "constitutional right" to "keep and bear arms." The idea seems to be, "With enough laws, enough regulations, enough prohibitions of this and that presumed threatening, frightening behavior, we'll eventually arrive at an ideal society in which everybody can feel 'safe'." So, "If nobody can have guns, nobody will ever get shot." We'll have a "safe society," so the (alleged) "reasoning" goes, when every "unsafe" thing, or action, or person is "against the law" and "safely incarcerated or prohibited." Do You really believe that?

Friends, it doesn't take a Rocket Scientist to see where that road leads. It leads straight to Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago. It leads to a world in which "everything not prohibited is compulsory." For the vast majority of children this is already a fulfilled reality: "School:" twelve years of forced incarceration for the "crime" ( ? ) of being young - in direct violation, by the way, of the (so-called) "13th Amendment" to the (so-called) "Constitution," the (so-called) "supreme Law of the Land:"

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

School is in fact the very place where tyranny is "taught," indoctrinated and justified. The purpose of School is the exact opposite of education in the Cosmic sense described above. Its purpose is not to enlarge Human experience, but to narrow it, confine it, control it. The single purpose of School is to acclimate an innocent and pliable population of emergent Human Beings to a life of deliberate slavery; and the episode at Columbine High School last month, and similar episodes before and since, serve general notice from these emergent Human Beings that the agenda of School is no longer tolerable. How many times will this kind of "message" have to be repeated before it attracts the appropriate attention and actually awakens a global population of somnambulists?

Among the Readers of these remarks it is possible there may be conscientious and sincere Parents, Teachers, policeMen / Women, Administrators, Legislators, etc. who might take exception to them, or find them offensive. It is not my purpose to offend, but to awaken. Whatever Your profession, dear Reader, You are first a Human Being and resident of Earth; and that is a Cosmic Fact deserving the highest honor and praise. I sincerely salute You, whoever You are, or think You are, simply and purely for being here, right now. You too are on the stage, and playing Your part in the most extraordinary unfolding drama ever enacted upon this Planet: the dramatic and stupendous Awakening of the Human Race!! "Cast of Billions! Hundreds of Thousands of Years in the Making! Never Before Seen on Earth!" You! And like the superlative Actors in the little scene at Columbine High School last month, You too are playing Your part, flawlessly and to perfection. Moreover, it is You, and You only, who decides what Your part is, what Your lines and actions are. You are writing Your own script, every moment of every day, and deciding how the drama unfolds. To You I throw my hat in the air and shout, "Bravo!" with thunderous applause!

I too have a part to play in this magnificent drama, and it is simply this: "Education:" to awaken the somnambulists, not with bullets or harsh invective (others may take those parts if they wish), but with empowering, illuminating observations (at least that is my intent and hope) rendered with Love and Light. I cannot see the condition of the contemporary world as anybody's "fault;" yet I cannot help observing also that together we all (myself included) have manifested a situation - a "virtual reality," if you will - that I for one would like to move beyond as quickly as possible. I would like to see the manifest emergence of a "new paradigm" world in which the prevailing mood is one of "Love and Light" instead of "fight / flight."

However, we cannot arrive in a "new paradigm" world with "old paradigm" habits and practices; so I say again, there "must" be some changes made in our respective individual minds, hearts and souls. "Must" is in "quotes" because these changes "must not" be the product of coercion in any form: they "must" spring spontaneously and voluntarily and intentionally into the midst of each Person's life. It is not an "impossible dream," for "Love and Light" are already at the core of every Being in Cosmos, Human or otherwise. "Fight / flight" is a response to perceptions, but "Love and Light" is what We are. Education, as I see it, consists simply of the re-discovery of that simple Cosmic Fact of Life. That is My part. What is Your part?

Love & Light,

-- Harmon
J. Harmon Grahn