An age of trans­ition – that is a com­mon­place. Man has always lived, and lives, and will live in an age of trans­ition. Accord­ing to East­ern wis­dom, earthly exist­ence is merely a bridge to cross, not to build a house on. The bridge is a good example, for it expresses con­nec­tion, but also sep­ar­a­tion. Without the dis­tance between the shores there is no bridge, and without sep­ar­a­tion there is no con­nec­tion. To take the thought high­er still, without part­ing there is no meet­ing.

In most cases a bridge is a built struc­ture, though there are bridges given by nature as well: a fallen tree trunk arch­ing over a stream, a stone arch join­ing rocky peaks, or the valency-bridges of the ele­ments. Bridges form between people too: con­nec­tion may come alive, and phys­ic­al, men­tal or emo­tion­al rela­tion­ships may arise.

A built bridge is a vic­tory, some­times a vic­tory only just won, over the forces of nature. Liana bridges some­times stir more fear than con­fid­ence of ever reach­ing the far shore. Such bridges express a com­pul­sion to keep mov­ing, and it is bet­ter to get across before they give way. The stur­di­er bridges also embody the pause, the look down­ward. Beneath them the unstop­pable flood rolls on, yet they them­selves stand firm, and the flow­ing water seems to carry away with it the fate of cen­tur­ies. After a short rev­er­ie, one crosses to the far shore.

But how does this trans­ition come about? What hap­pens on this shore, and what awaits us bey­ond? Can a way of see­ing the world be framed as a sys­tem, one that recog­nises this shore and the far shore, and sees the con­nec­tion between the two as well?

Life on the Other Side

  • 1. This Soul is a bridge and a bar­ri­er that divides the worlds. This bar­ri­er is crossed neither by day nor by night, nor by old age, nor by death and grief, nor by pious deeds, nor by wicked deeds. Every sin turns back from here, for the world of Brah­man is sin­less.
  • 2. Truly, hav­ing crossed this bar­ri­er, the sight­less will no longer be blind, the wounded will no longer be hurt, the sor­row­ful will grieve no more. Truly, hav­ing crossed this bar­ri­er, even the night is like the day, for the world of Brah­man is ever radi­ant.
  • 3. But the world of Brah­man is found only by the dis­ciples of the sac­red sci­ence; theirs is the world of Brah­man. They come and go freely, as they please, in every one of the worlds. (Chan­dogya Upan­ishad, sec­tion 8.4)

After the geo­graph­ic­al and tech­no­lo­gic­al dis­cov­er­ies, we have arrived at the threshold of meta­phys­ic­al insights. It seems we have reached our outer lim­its, and so the need arises to map our inner world. Sys­tems of world­view suc­ceed one anoth­er, yet the need for last­ing wis­dom is felt ever more keenly. His­tor­ic­al, outer truth is joined by a myth­ic, inner truth, summed up in the alli­ance of a good mind and a good heart. In this spir­it, we must see more clearly, under­stand bet­ter and act more rightly.

Paradigm is a Greek word mean­ing example, pat­tern, model, and in gram­mar a pat­tern of inflec­tion, an inflec­tion­al series, an example used for com­par­is­on. A paradigm can also be defined as a series of ele­ments that cor­res­pond to one anoth­er, are in some way equi­val­ent, and are there­fore inter­change­able. In the early six­ties it acquired a fur­ther mean­ing, in the sense of a pre­vail­ing doc­trine, a sci­entif­ic pic­ture of the world. Yet it is worth widen­ing the concept of paradigm fur­ther still, bey­ond the circle of the sci­entif­ic world, and under­stand­ing it in an even more uni­ver­sal sense. In our view, a paradigm is noth­ing other than one pos­sible model for inter­pret­ing the world. These mod­els have replaced one anoth­er sev­er­al times in the course of his­tory. Object­ively and sub­ject­ively alike, we stand before a paradigm shift: the world is chan­ging, and we ourselves are chan­ging too.