360 - The Problem with Paradigm Shifts - My life in Rabbit Holes

 

Paradigm Shift: an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way."

Rabbit Hole: used to refer to a bizarre, confusing, or nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.

When I first watched my Grandmother read Tarot for family members, I was about 7 years old. I was fascinated by the possibility that these magical cards could tell people things that helped them see parts of their lives with some clarity.

When I was a teenager, I started to feel depressed about the fact that my life would be a constant irritant of jobs I had to do until retirement at old age, and then death. That is when I decided to pick an art form to master, so at least the jobs would have some fun attached. I chose theatre arts.

In University, the freedom from living at my parent's house and drug induced trips (sorry, Mum!) were more fascinating than acting classes and the schedule of learning things and exams I didn't care about. I started reading philosophy books and dove into the eastern religions. I also picked up the guitar at that time as my roommate had a classical, which was a nice mix of violin and piano I had played growing up.

I quit University after one year, and started busking with my guitar on Toronto streets for money. It was great. It was freeing. It was something outside of the constant looming life of school-work-death.

Moving to the West Coast, I was able to continue busking and working at cafes to support a lifestyle of acid trips, where I would write songs trying to figure out how the Western World got into this mode of consumerism and greed and sleepwalking. I hitchhiked for a while into the U.S. and Mexico, always having my guitar to make money in the cities and my tent to camp in the outskirts for free. And continuing my psychedelic journey into the unknown.

When I moved back, I got caught in a relationship with a poet twice my age, and had a horrible time trying to get out of it after a couple years of mental/emotional and finally physical abuse.

After that, I found myself working at a metaphysical bookstore where my first forays into David Icke, Marianne Williamson, Caroline Myss, Rumi, Ken Wilber, Esther and Jerry Hicks, Indigenous American philosophy, The Occult, Gnosticism, Channeled material, Astrology, Tarot, Meditation and a whole host of Gurus kept me well occupied while navigating the invisible fence between physical reality and metaphysics.

The one thing I took away from these forays and experiences is that there is always something else, something more, something different, and that people are drawn to exacting answers - of which there are many and none. It is a tightrope we all walk, though I now find that most people tend to fall into traps of 'exact' and black/white problems/solutions. 

In 2015 I signed The Treaty of the International Tribunal for Natural Justice and volunteered for that organization, promoting and writing for the Sovereign Voice, a magazine and movement profiling the evolution of humanity; from the ‘old earth’ paradigm of corporate dictate and total embezzlement and control of human energy and resource into a ‘New Earth’ of self-governance through the liberation of humanitarian efforts... After nearly two years, I realized that the people involved in this organization, and many like it, were living in echo chambers - if you didn't agree with them, you were 'asleep' and needed to wake up. It got bizarre and it seemed to go against Natural Law, the very thing it advocated for. I quit.

I still believe in Natural Law. I understand that there are bad people in powerful positions, secret groups and meetings about things, pulling strings, outside of general public awareness. However, if individuals cannot think for themselves and become pawns of the many games being played, they are not forwarding the very things they fundamentally believe.

The problem with paradigm shifts is that new ways of thinking become confusing environments to navigate - people are then inclined to anchor themselves with immobile ideologies. We all should be asking ourselves constantly: What if I'm wrong? What if I'm right? Do I have the Whole picture? Am I caught in ego-mind?

and the implications of the variable answers in our own lives and humanity as a whole.