What is to be expected after the materialist, scientific paradigm that still prevails but is already in decline? Many were waiting for the pole shift, others are hoping for the Age of Aquarius or a spiritual quantum leap, but the essential change, the change of world view, can be expected to come in another way. According to Béla Hamvas, mankind rests on three pillars: the synthesising traditions, intuition and reason. If we use only reason, rationality, without inner purity and transcendent aims, its sad consequences are mirrored in today's ecological and psycho-spiritual catastrophe. Intuitive thinking and a spiritual vision of the world do not come cheap, for they call for an elevated plane of consciousness and a purer way of life, and one has to get there.
The experience of the traditions is extremely important, and the self-evident truths hidden in them are man's spiritual gold reserve of millennia, but there is no going back. What is needed is not restoration but construction. For a new world view to unfold, however, the old one must be dismantled, or rather, its vestigial parts. This is not the zeal of revolutionaries, who forever wish to overthrow the old order, and then, when the revolution itself becomes the ‘old order’, cling to their own power tooth and nail.
That is precisely why disinterested action is one of the basic tenets of the new paradigm – this, of course, requires knowing the order behind things, the ultimate laws and ordering principles of the universe, otherwise one falls into the trap of usurping power. Another basic tenet is the outlook of equals, set against the exclusionary, exclusive principle of dominance that has prevailed until now and that mirrors a sense of being chosen. A great deal of trouble springs from the sense of being chosen – incomprehension, the sham freedom of free competition, the dilution of norms and moral decay. Exclusionary thinking is fuelled by passion, and it is the basis of the religious fanaticism of the one saving faith, whose misbegotten ideological offspring are the former communist ideology or the still-existing Western-type democracy – all three strive to present themselves as the only solution.
The competitive spirit inevitably divides people into winners and losers left behind, which is why a further principle is needed: the basic stance that both sides win. At first sight this tenet seems incomprehensible, since a war, or for that matter a business deal or an Olympic final, is decided in favour of a single winner.
Yet more and more people feel the need for change, and to see how this change of outlook can come about, one example from alternative education is enough, where, instead of banning cribbing, they reward it when the better pupil openly, almost as a teaching assistant, supports the classmates who need help and guides them to the right solution. This is a huge step, for it teaches not hidden and illicit solutions but open-hearted help founded on mutual benefit.
This too is a basic tenet of the paradigm shift, and an organic part of dismantling the ego, which calls for individual inner work. Misunderstood egoism, fed from countless sources, is a serious obstacle to improving our personal world view. A real paradigm shift also requires laying aside personal conditioning, the rigidity that comes with position, and the ambitions that strive to rise above others. In the personal paradigm shift we have to redefine our elemental relationship to the most fundamental phenomena of the world – space, time, man, God – and examine whether we truly have knowledge, or mere information?
What, then, should the new paradigm be? A metaphysical paradigm that blends the virtues of the traditions, intuition and reason, that is committed to spiritual values, that strives for a higher synthesis of consciousness and explores the eternal aspects of earthly existence which point beyond it, could be the solution. This is furthered by creating a spiritual network that connects capable people who, in spiritual harmony, do good each in his own place. This good is in fact nothing other than an investment in the widest sphere of man's existence, in body, spirit and soul.