Of Black Hats, White Hats, and Mad Hatters

Excuse me while I slip outta this old paradigm and into something more comfortable.

The first law of wingwalking is: Never leave hold of one branch before taking hold of another. I now declare the first law of wingwalking null and void.

Again, the first law of paradigm shifts, as Thomas Kuhn suggests in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (or did he not suggest it and I just made it up?), is to allow cognitive dissonance to build until the old paradigm breaks under the weight of it, revealing the new.

I now declare the first law of paradigm shift as having itself been superseded. No new paradigm is visible; none has emerged; I look for none to emerge. We are the new paradigm.

Here I am, left without a dime, a paradigm or even a plugged nickel. Just as we cannot take anything with us into the afterlife, so we also cannot take anything of the old into the new world we face today, brave or otherwise. But I can laugh!

As a sovereign citizen of Planet Earth and a conscious co-creator, I let go of the branch called the old paradigm without having a hold on anything else. I know not truth or space. I am truth and space.

The new paradigm is to have no new paradigm – not if it’s conceptual, explanatory, a belief or a framework. It’s none of these.

Conceptual framework is superseded. Belief system is abandoned. Explanations have become outmoded..”

The new paradigm can only be lived and I can only describe it, dropping all pretense to “knowledge” and “explanation

Nothing I knew before can explain anything I will meet hereafter.

Wittgenstein said, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But he then stepped away from the mystery and entered an everyday world of which he doubtless felt he could speak. I face an everyday world that is rapidly becoming the mystery itself, whereof I cannot speak.

Ah, but my suffering is illusory! Goodbye to all that. I gladly take up the challenge.

Mad hatter, indeed!

Let novelty reign! The old strangeness is dead! Long live the new strangeness!

~ Steve Beckow - The 2012 Scenario