The New Paradigm
vol. I, Number Six

Dear Friends,

I'd like to discuss with you my understanding of duality.

It is my belief that there are no 'mistakes' in the universe, that all is one and if we are to embrace 'oneness' as good, then EVERYTHING has a positive intention and moves us towards enlightenment.

With increased knowledge and belief of the power we hold within comes increased responsibility of how to use this force to the greater good. We may decide on a personal quest to clean up our thoughts, recognising our fear-based anxiety and reactions, and look deeply inside for the answers. True change certianly begins within each individual Human Being, but in order to be truly inspired about personal change it is important to me to grasp the bigger picture. Why am I moved to change? The answer lies in the true understanding of seperation. As long as I believe myself to be seperate and alone, finding it necessary to steal energy and manipulate others for my own ends, then this competition shall hold me in fear and duality as I battle to maintain my false identity.

Since time immemorial we have given existance to an opposite force from that of God, as if a seperate entity, and both the good and evil are apart and outside of us. The moment we give credence to fear or evil we give energy to what some define as Satan, and in worshipping two opposing forces we forego oneness. If God is purity and all there is, then an opposing force cannot exist. It is an illusion of the mind, as there can be no existence of anything outside of the absolute. I cannot judge one to be evil and take away his God, because if evil exists God is not.

(To live - reversed = evil - against life)

Souls came to earth taking dense physical form to experience life with PART of their consciousness. Over time, however, this part of the 'self' lost sight of it's source, so occupied was it with things of matter. Instead of experiencing life and moving on, the part of the soul became stuck, lost and alone, striving to maintain energy in physicality, denying itself the presence of its expanded reality, the true and greater self.

So in seperating itself from the oneness, the 'altered ago' came into reality, and aiming to claim autonomy and become God in its own right, true competition and defensiveness was born. The defensive ego feverishly defends what it percieves to be its reality; too full of a false sense of importance to listen to the truth; denying real feelings, intuitions and knowings emanating from the greater self that could break the disguise and pretence, and thus expose the ego self as incomplete and merely part of the greater whole. Following lifetimes of experience believing the illusion of seperateness, the altered ego more fervently denies the truth and aligns with 'the body' as the true identity, using a large portion of it's energy to maintain, feed, clothe, shelter, beautify and glorify 'the body'. Such emphasis is then placed upon it that the loss or death of this reduced false identity is percieved as almost unthinkable by the altered ego, and indeed the fear expands as preservation of the body and false identity becomes an all consuming task.

Thus the possibility of disease and accidents perpetuate the fear, and the ego holds on to its percieved reality at all costs. So fear and lack come into existence and are given attention. Each other individual is seen as a some-body striving to maintain its identity, and competing for a percieved lack of resources in the physical world.

How many know of instances where one attempting to further glorify the self builds a lovely pedestal, but gets to a point where the stool is shaking, where their truth is challenged, where their greatness may proove short lived? In desperation they may hurt, maime or even kill to prevent the embarrasment of exposure and subsequent loss of energy. They may turn against the hand that has fed them and use it to magnify their position through threats and blackmail. What are they protecting? Only their false identity, the altered ego, determined to protect its vulnerable self from exposure and the truth of its shortcomings.

This is, however, a false state of the mind, 'the fall of man,' and a false identity assuming importance while the glorious, all-knowing consciousness observes the game, but is denied acknowledgement. This false state of identity strives for independence, believing itself to be seperate and alone. But as all is really 'one,' and there are no 'mistakes' in the universe, this altered state of mind becomes part of the master plan.

How could we truly know the power and truth of the greater self had we not chosen at some level to take part in this great experiment where free will gave absolute freedom? Did we not take on the pain, hurt and restrictions of time and space reality to truly 'know thyself' and eventually return in all our gloriousness so much richer and more enlightened by the experience? Taking the evolution of God consciousness even further towards 'knowing' the oneness that exists, perhaps only by experiencing we can truly know the truth of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God.

Now a fact that needs discussing right here is that with all good intention a person may, following realisation, desire to rid itself of the ego, and being familiar with the battle and struggle scenario, may percieve then that they have a fight on their hands, and so give way and react under the old belief in duality that represents yet more opposition: the old world of opposites that does not serve us. The answer lies then not in resistance to the altered ego but to, 'let go and let God'. So do not deny the energy of the ego. It is to be understood, forgiven and integrated as a misguided child that had a mistaken, confused idea of reality.

So what is your individual way home? Are you ready to give up your false identity, never betray your truth, become vulnerable, trust that we can hold hands and in coming back to oneness, honor the true part of our being? Recognise the light of God in the eyes of another and communicate the truth together. Let go of our defences, and love so the depths of our beings are nourished, our true self acknowledged, and all hold hands in the light of God I Am.

How to balance the world of opposites is achieved largely by global understanding of the truth. The new paradigm is coming home to the truth within ourselves and allowing that understanding to penetrate the collective unconscious. Our 100th monkey* strikes again.

I could have ended this posting right here; however I believe there is one more step, and this next step may be the biggest challenge to your ego. You see, there isn't only selfish ego that we have been discussing; there is also selfless ego which one may term positive; i.e. a sense of self as balanced and complete; an esteemed part of the greater whole; a self that knows at some level that WE decided to be here right now in physical manifestation to assist in this process of raising the people of the earth to a new level of conscious awakening. In order to prevent us grabbing hold of this knowledge to glorify ourselves individually, we need to understand the futility of enhancing ourselves as seperate identities. I believe we have planned to do this together as an inter-dependent group. Fortuna Alliance® II is an important vechicle for this awakening, as is a newsletter such as this. Let us implement our plan, aligned and as one.

Love and blessings
Sue Fowler

_______________________

* [Editorial Footnote] For those not acquainted with the widely circulated story of the 100th Monkey: I may not have the facts entirely right, but the gist of the story concerns a population of monkeys artificially maintained by human anthropologists on an island from which none of the monkeys could escape. The monkeys were fed with food deposited on the beach of the island. This caused the food to become contaminated by sand, which the monkeys evidently found vexing, but it did not degrade the nutrition of the food. At some point, however, one monkey discovered that the problem of gritty food could be solved by washing the food before eating it, and fairly rapidly the practice spread throughout the population until it became universal.

The interesting part of the story is that soon thereafter monkeys on the mainland, with no discoverable contact with the isolated monkey population on the island, were observed washing their food before eating as well. The anthropologists surmised that after a certain critical threshold is reached an isolated practice may spread to a wider population, even though it is not learned by direct observation or imitation. The threshold has been termed, metaphorically, "the 100th monkey," suggesting that after, say, 100 monkeys had learned to wash their food the practice was adopted beyond the direct influence of the isolated population where it originated, by means the anthropologists were unable to explain.

A "new paradigm" understanding of the phenominon would not find it difficult to explain at all, because the perception that "all monkeys are One" would naturally lead to the expectation that anything useful any one monkey learned anywhere would then be available to all monkeys everywhere. This expectation applies to humans as well. [H.]

Thank You Sue, once again, for your penetrating insights into what we mean when we speak of the "new pardigm." If I may venture to summarize, or at least come at this on a somewhat different tack, I think you have made a number of significant points:

1. The perception that "all is One" implies that there can be no "anti-God," no "evil force" in "diabolical opposition" to the "force of God" or "force of good" in the universe; for such a force would be in opposition to and contradiction of the God-force manifest everywhere. This I take to be the cornerstone and the foundation of what we are discovering to be "new paradigm" thought.

2. We Human Beings have deliberately elected to experience life here on planet Earth, complete with the limitations and possible vexations of three-dimensional, carbon-based biological life, in order to come into a more intimate and direct experience of our limitless and sublime nature. By playing our infinite and multi-facited personality out in the field of space-time we gain direct experince of the limitless possibilities open to us as the One we are at heart.

3. Masquerading as multitudes of separate entities, we have by some silly oversight forgotten our true identity as the One, and have convinced ourselves instead that the ego identity which pilots our bodily forms is all that we really are. This catastrophic misconception has led us into endless labyrinths of self-contradictory, dishonest and imaginary "situations" frought with fear and loathing: a "virtual reality" of our own mental making which has no more substance than a bad dream.

4. Our ego identity is not inherently "villainous," but merely mistaken about its position in the scheme of things. Limited by nature to its local horizon, ego feels isolated, alone and painfully vulnerable, because it presumes that all it can see of Life, which is but little, is all there is. This "altered ego" is filled with fear because it mistakenly feels obliged to "take charge" of the Whole Show, at which it is in fact only a spectator, so to speak; a responsibility (i.e. "take charge") which infinitely surpasses its meager powers.

5. Finally, the self-realized ego is one who has arrived at an enlightened understanding of his / her proper position in Life and is consciously aware of the much larger Self of which ego is only a local and transient representative. Such self-realized personality, you caution us, may even yet fall again into the trap of an ego-centered perception; and you suggest that our experience together in Fortuna Alliance® II, and possibly in this forum, may help us to evade the ego traps and strengthen our sense of interdependent identity with one another and with All Things.

That isn't exactly a paraphrase, but perhaps it covers similar ground with a slightly different slant. These are weighty issues, and if our discussion becomes seemingly repetitive, I think that's just fine; for these things bear repeating, and examination from many different angles.

Thank you again, Sue, for an excellent article. [H.]

The following is slightly off-topic, but brief, and may be of some assistance to writers wishing to contribute to this forum. It has to do with a centuries-old deficiency of the English language which makes communication awkward in some instances. I'll quote a paragraph from my work You, which I have mentioned before:

1.7. A note on gender and its representation in the English language:
Contemporary civilization bears a traditionally patriarchal bias, which in recent years has been a source of aggravation to a growing constituency of women. This patriarchal bias is reflected particularly in English usage which, lacking a gender-neutral third person pronoun, typically uses he or him in overwhelming preference to she or her when denoting a person of indeterminate sex. In response to mounting pressure from the feminine element, many contemporary writers have taken considerable pains to compensate for the patriarchal bias by using such awkward constructions as he / she or him or her or s/he in attempting to deal with what is after all a shortcoming of the language. Or they have interspersed masculine and feminine personal pronouns in their texts, perhaps overcompensating somewhat on the side of the feminine. It is simply an awkward fact that there does not exist in the English language a third person gender-neutral personal pronoun; therefore it has been found necessary to invent one: shim, a simple blend of she and him. In the text that follows the personal pronoun shim and its derivatives will be used in all instances where the gender of the person referred to is of no moment.

New words are often awkward, and only become comfortable with use; but the absence of a legitimate gender-neutral personal pronoun may be more awkward still. When you want one, it just isn't there, and none of the usual work-arounds are at all adequate. So I invite you, if you wish, to use shim, shim's, etc. when called for, in writing for this forum. [H.]

Lastly, in the past as new subscribers have requested inclusion on the New Paradigm List, I have obliged by sending them copies of all issues of The New Paradigm they would have missed prior to their subscription request. I have lately set up an archive at [http://harmonhouse.net/fdl/tnp.htm] for The New Paradigm [if you're reading this, you've found it; however all prior issues are no longer archived, only selected editions] where all issues prior to this one are posted in HTML fromat; and to which I plan to add as new issues are compiled and posted. So you may wish to bookmark that, and refer others to it who might like to subscribe but would appreciate a preview.

I think that should about do it for this time. I want to wish you all a Jolly Christmas (if you celebrate Christmas in your part of the world) and a Prosperous, Healthful and Victorious Year in 1998!

Love & Light,

-- Harmon
J. Harmon Grahn