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Paradigm Crunch

by Joseph Dispenza

Does the dramatic increase in world-wide disasters suggest that we are living through the much-predicted planetary Paradigm Shift?

If you have been thinking that disasters, both natural and human-made, are on the increase, you are right - they are.

On one recent day, two commuter trains collided in downtown Los Angeles, killing ten people and seriously injuring 200; a truck carrying chemicals crashed and fell onto its side on a bridge in Maryland; thirty-one Marines went down in a helicopter crash in Iraq; a school bus on a highway in Florida suddenly swerved, toppled, and landed upside-down. Two days before that, the earth gave way under part of La Conchita, California and dozens of people died or were injured. For the two weeks prior to that, unremitting rains soaked the area, causing mudslides, power outages, and scores of auto accidents.

A plane force-lands on a freeway in New Jersey, and plows into a bridge, killing all aboard. Fire breaks out in a chemicals plant outside Oklahoma City, endangering the lives of thousands. As I write this, a report comes in that an Afghan Plane has crashed, and all 104 in it are dead.

Ice storms crack across the South, sub-zero cold descends for days in the Northeast, Boston is buried under three feet of snow, snow in Hawaii, parts of Europe are paralyzed by record-breaking bad weather.

Then, of course, there was the Christmas Tsunami, which affected half a million people, leaving, by present accounting, more than 250,000 dead.

What is going on? Is it just our imagination, or has the volume been turned way up on disasters around the planet? Are we seeing more disasters now, or are more simply being reported?

Scientist Michael Ray ruminates about this in a recent article, "A Metaphor for a Worldwide Paradigm Shift." A colleague of his did a study of natural and human-caused disasters over the most recent historical period in which recording was reliable - and there had not been significant changes in measurement procedures. His conclusion was that there had been a significant increase in disasters over the last fifty years and that the increase was increasing.

As Ray's colleague presented his results, he asked fellow scientists why they thought this was happening. The human-caused disasters could be explained by population increases and technology changes. But the natural disasters were the major part of the increase, and they had no explanation other than divine intervention. So much for scientific speculation.

If you saw a person acting the way the planet and its dominant species has been acting recently - stumbling around, dropping things, bumping into walls, spilling, careening, falling over - you would have to say the person was terribly stressed-out. It may be our entire world is under tremendous stress at this time. If so, where is the stress coming from? More important, when will it end, and how do we deal with it while we are going through it?

The stress we are experiencing may be a symptom of great change. Whether you are listening to physicists, astrologers, or theologians, the message is the same: we appear to be living between two world "patterns" - the old one, and the one that is birthing, but not here yet. These huge invisible patterns, or paradigms, are whole systems that define who we are and what the world is. Think of the paradigm that prevailed when it was believed that the earth was a big table-top; then think of the paradigm (the present one) that operated when it was discovered that the earth was round.

The new paradigm coming upon us will be as amazing to us as the round-earth paradigm was to people of the 16th Century. We are beginning to see it, but we are living under the old paradigm as well. It is as if a new clear plastic template containing new knowledge, ideas, and attitudes were laid atop an old one. We can make out some of the new pattern, but the old pattern is still there; the picture is complicated and confusing. Looking at it is... stressful.

It seems we are in the midst of a paradigm crunch, a place between two worlds. In this remarkable place, there not many guideposts. We know things are changing, but we do not know when the change will end, or how the world will look to us at the end. The best we can do is to try to keep our balance though the process.

The clearer we are about the nature of the new paradigm, the less stressful this time will be. While we are waiting for the world to alter itself - and us with it - there is something we might contemplate. All these disasters, the vision of all these thousands of people in distress, might be about how you and I respond to human suffering. Maybe the new pattern emerging on the planet is about the dawning awareness of each other as brothers and sisters in the same human family. The theme of the new paradigm could be that we are all one, and what happens to one of us happens to all of us.

The paradigm crunch may be bringing us - kicking and screaming, it often seems - into a new world of planetary interconnectedness where universal compassion is finally realized. [an error occurred while processing this directive]