Paradigm Shift
Seeing soul as a part of all that is living may require me to make a paradigm shift – a shift in perception, a new inner construction. It may not be so much an accumulation of new knowledge as a change in the way I see. Seeing the world as alive and teeming with soul and spirit is a shift in consciousness or a change in the way I am used to understanding things. The way that I perceive the world need not be fixed. After all, before Columbus, many people really did think the world was flat.
I am willing to see things differently.
The word paradigm comes from the Greek… In the more general sense, it’s the way we “see” the world – not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, interpreting.
For our purposes, a simple way to understand paradigms is to see them as maps. We all know that “the map is not the territory. ” A map is simply an explanation of certain aspects of the territory. That’s exactly what a paradigm is. It is a theory, an explanation, or model of something else.
Stephen R. Covey